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The dominant story of 2023 for salespeople, marketers, and content creators has been the rise of generative AI.

ChatGPT, the application based on OpenAI’s Large Language Model (LLM), now has the fastest adoption rate in history, reaching 100 million daily active users within two months of launch.

Yet most sales reps and marketers still use generative AI tools on an ad hoc basis to generate content — from email drafts to talking points, and ad copy to new product designs. And many haven’t yet experimented with generative AI at all.

There’s a major, often overlooked area of opportunity when it comes to AI: Becoming a more customer-centric organization.

Here, we’ll explore how three organizations used generative AI to achieve enhanced customer-centricity, and how your own business can, too.

Keep reading, or jump to a specific section: 

• How the Generative AI Revolution Will Evolve Over Time
• How Three Companies Leveraged AI to Become More Customer-Centric [And How You Can, Too]
• How AI Helps Your Team Become More Customer-Centric

What if the real generative AI superpower is enhanced customer-centricity?

If you’re a sales rep, a marketer, or a leader of an SMB, you can’t afford to ignore the generative AI revolution.

But you also can’t afford to get generative AI adoption wrong. And that means thinking about your people, your processes, and your organizational goals and capabilities as much as — or more than — the technology itself.

Generative AI has the potential to level the playing field for smaller businesses when it comes to customer-centricity.

With far less money, time, and specialized expertise than ever before, organizations can listen to their customers at scale, develop actionable insights about them, and then engage them to drive growth and profitability.

How the Generative AI Revolution Will Evolve Over Time

Despite all of the frenzy around ChatGPT (and, to a lesser extent Bard, Bing, Midjourney, Adobe Generative Fill, etc.), the future of generative AI within sales and marketing functions is still very much up for grabs.

The first wave of adoption has been overwhelmingly individual, ad-hoc, and designed to save time on a process-by-process basis.

The real impact of generative AI will come with the second wave, and will require an approach that is team-based, planned, and designed to enhance capabilities and processes.

The third wave of adoption will be transformational and will demand approaches that are organization-wide, enable continuous learning (via iterative feedback loops), and designed to shape new capabilities and processes.

	Wave 1	Wave 2	Wave 3
Who?	Individual	Team	Organization
How?	Ad-Hoc	Planned	Continuous Learning
Why?	Saving time	Adding value to processes	Transforming processes

Right now, we’re still solidly in the midst of Wave 1. The real battle will be for marketing and sales functions to accelerate their transitions to Waves 2 and 3 faster and more strategically than the competition.

Unlike experimentation by motivated individuals, team or organization-wide adoption will run into barriers like organizational inertia, employee concerns about possible job loss, data privacy and security constraints, data integration challenges, and of course, knowledge and capability gaps.

A Better Approach

Here at Glimpse we’re strong believers in the potential of AI to revolutionize sales, marketing, and market research. In fact, long before ChatGPT fever, we were already working on a custom NLP (Natural Language Processing) model to help our users understand — and then extract actionable insights from — human language responses to open-ended survey questions.

We thought about how we could harness the power of generative AI to help our users with the most important task facing any business: Understanding their customers, employees, stakeholders, and audiences better. Paradoxically, relying more on generative AI in this context can actually supercharge human understanding and connection.

Glimpse users can now summarize and capture the essence of open-ended responses with the touch of a button, and derive invaluable insights instantly like “top negative story”, “most newsworthy ideas”, or “suggested text for a blog post”. They can also filter by any audience segment or demographic/behavioral attribute. Learn more about our AI-powered offerings here.

Next, let’s jump into three examples of how companies leverage AI to hyper-charge their customer centricity.

How Three Companies Leveraged AI to Become More Customer-Centric [And How You Can, Too]

1. Gaming Communities for an Agency

Along with our friend, client, and trusted partner, Jocelyn Harjes, from Ayzenberg, an ad agency in the video gaming space, we used generative AI to listen to the experiences and concerns of female-identifying, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA+ gamers at scale.

Here’s a look at what we discovered:

The story isn’t all negative. Lots of gamer respondents offered positive lessons about how to deal with and respond to toxic behavior online. Here’s a Positive Story instantly created by our dashboard’s generative AI integration based on 500 open-ended responses:

Impact

With the help of generative AI, the agency and some of its gaming publisher clients will be using AI-enabled data and insights from the study to:

• Grasp the full range of toxic experiences, from slurs to organized harassment
• Demonstrate that toxic behavior was leading to a ‘leaky bucket’ and gamer churn, causing game companies to miss out on revenue opportunities
• Gather suggested strategies for dealing with personal attacks
• Draft recommendations for game publishers to build more inclusive digital communities

Though this study focused on gamers within digital communities, the same approach could be applied to any audience, about any topic.

2. Black Holiday Traditions for Retailers

In another example, an agency focusing on Black consumers wanted to bring fresh insights about the diversity of Black identity and holiday traditions to their retail clients.

But they faced an array of challenges:

• The usual close-ended survey questions just weren’t working for discovery. Respondents chose from the typical census categories to describe their identities but the agency knew “Black” concealed lots of differences that mattered to their retail clients in terms of messaging.
• Focus groups and In-Depth-Interviews (IDI’s) were too slow, expensive, and unrepresentative to rely on. And the coding process would require skilled employees to determine things like sentiment.
• Social listening tools were useful but they could only access third-party data passively on a few platforms. They tended to register the ‘loudest voices in the room’ and were hardly representative. And of course it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to ask anyone direct questions.

The agency launched a series of studies to a total of 3,000 Black Americans on our platform. Open-ended questions about shopping habits and holiday traditions revealed a host of new insights about spending power, present-giving, and holiday meal planning.

Even more interesting were the responses to the question about identity, where people wrote honestly and poignantly about their heritage, how they fit into their communities, and how they were seen by others.

While this type of data is priceless and valuable to brands, it’s prohibitively slow and expensive to code a sample 3,000 responses like this.

With generative AI integrations, our client was able to organize, categorize, and instantly capture summaries of open-ended responses by segment.

Generative AI in Action

Here’s the top Positive Story our dashboard instantly generated based on 1,000 of those open-ended responses to the question about identity, along with supporting verbatim quotes from actual respondents:

And here’s a deeper dive into what the first response looks like, along with respondent-selected emojis representing her emotional reaction to the question:

Impact

The retailers will be using AI-enabled data and insights from the study to:

• Align mental (advertising communications) and physical (products on the shelves, channel and packaging strategy, etc.) availability for this important consumer group
• Craft holiday campaigns and messaging to authentically and powerfully connect with Black communities
• Tailor shopper marketing initiatives to better match the shopping habits, rhythms, and needs of Black communities

3. B2B Machine Learning in Agriculture Startup

When a large tech company placed a big investment on a startup that used machine learning tools to help save the planet and feed the world, that startup worked with our team to shape core aspects of its product and commercialization strategy.

At first glance, ML/AI adoption is a straightforward feature and benefits calculus, but the startup knew that understanding buyer emotions, hopes, and anxieties about ML/AI-driven disruption would be equally central to its success.

With our platform, the company surveyed hundreds of ML/AI decision-makers and users — from enterprise farms in Argentina and Brazil, to off-takers in Canada and Germany.

With the help of generative AI, the startup discovered opportunities to educate buyers with approaches tailored to the differing needs of various markets, job roles, and industries. They were also able to identify opportunities across particularly promising national markets, and opportunities to target firms within a specific size range.

Generative AI in Action

Here are Newsworthy Ideas our dashboard instantly generated based on open-ended responses:

And here’s a sample blog post the dashboard used generative AI to instantly create, again based on open-ended responses. (Of course the post is only intended as a starting draft for human writers to contextualize, edit, and bring to life!):

The start-up is currently using AI-enabled data and insights from the study to:

• Shape product design and development priorities
• Educate buyers–with approaches tailored to the differing needs of various markets, job roles, and industries
• Spot opportunities in particularly promising national markets
• Discover why and how to target client firms within specific size and revenue ranges
• Craft brand awareness messaging to connect with these buyers
• Plan subsequent rounds of studies to further test product and marketing strategies in a more agile manner

Next, let’s dive into four opportunities to become more customer-centric thanks to the power of AI.

How AI Helps Your Team Become More Customer-Centric

Here are four tips for your organization to adopt generative AI successfully. They apply regardless of firm size, industry, or market. And they definitely apply regardless of the tech stack you’ve chosen.

1. AI enables you to become more agile.

Generative AI allows us to adopt an agile approach, not only to social listening, but also to the collection and analysis of first-party data. And it allows smaller companies and start-ups without huge research or insights functions to get in the game.

Rather than developing customer or audience insights at the beginning of an annual strategic planning process, listen more regularly and course-correct constantly. Test your assumptions, your product innovation vision, your sales approaches, your campaigns, and your content on a regular basis. You’ll achieve higher ROI on your marketing and sales investments and you’ll connect more effectively with your customers.

2. AI helps you track changes over time.

Generative AI can help us spot emerging patterns, opportunities, and risks. But change only becomes visible if we’ve established baseline data to figure out what ‘normal’ looks like. With Generative AI, historical data is even more valuable than ever before. It allows us to train our models to become more nuanced and effective within the context of our own business challenges.

For instance, many Glimpse clients are now shifting to an ‘always-on’ approach to gathering and analyzing survey data. They’re looking at the relationships between categories, brands, or products and particular audiences. Our AI-enabled dashboard allows them to get ahead of change by tracking trends over time.

For instance, if you want to know whether an economic downturn or a new public health scare is likely to change the purchasing behavior of your customers, generative AI-enabled first party research is a great option.

Until now these kinds of brand tracking studies were often prohibitively expensive for all but the largest organizations. But generative AI helps keep costs down and opens the field for the rest of us. And even if you do have an existing brand tracking study, you can use a generative AI-powered module looking at open-ended responses to explain why a number went up or down, and help discover the best path forward for your business.

3. AI enables you to adopt a holistic approach.

Generative AI can be applied to any data source to find patterns, spot opportunities or warning signs, and help develop insights. Though generative AI can provide the most value, relatively speaking, when it comes to unstructured data (like human language), it can also look at relationships between data sources, like social listening, first-party customer or sales data, and the kind of agile first-party survey data that Glimpse provides.

Without first-party research, all the social intelligence in the world will never give you a complete picture of what audiences are thinking or feeling, or aware of. It’s time to think more holistically by integrating generative AI-powered first-party data approaches into all of your data collection and strategic planning processes.

4. AI helps you become more future-oriented.

The issue isn’t whether or not you should explore generative AI adoption for your organization. You should! Rather the issue is the best approach to adoption. Here are some questions you can ask yourself and your team to get started:

• What’s our policy on generative AI right now? Whether you know it or not, your people are already using generative AI for work tasks. It’s time to get ahead of change by offering flexible guidelines instead of fixed rules. These guidelines should cover attribution/acknowledgement of AI assistance, the need to double check AI-generated answers for factual accuracy, the rule-of-thumb that no AI-generated text should be pasted directly into a client email or ad copy without human editing, and so on.
• Do we have the skills/capabilities/talent on our team right now to use generative AI effectively? If not, consider sponsoring training or supervised experimentation before you conclude that you need to hire to fill the capability gap. With rare exceptions, you won’t be building your own Large Language Models (LLMs) or doing much technical work; instead, you’ll be making common sense applications of existing generative AI platforms and APIs. And you’ll inevitably be faced with a build/buy/tailor decision regarding AI tools and capabilities. For most companies, the best decision will be to license existing tech and then tailor it in smart ways to meet their needs. But along the way, they’ll need to understand and track the incredibly fast-moving universe of AI platforms and models.
• Does process or team structure need to evolve? The answer to this question — eventually, anyway – is almost certainly, “yes.” In order to take advantage of generative AI-driven approaches to data gathering and analysis, you’ll have to lean even more heavily into cross-functional teams, with marketers, salespeople, and data experts frequently testing hypotheses about the market, customers, products, campaigns, and more. Rather than a waterfall approach to customer insights, where they get created once a year by an agency or by a few specialists, you’ll want to foster an ongoing, iterative process to learn about the audiences that matter most for the success of your business.

It’s time to take seriously the idea that the greatest, least examined application of generative AI is actually customer understanding, support for human insight creation, and the ability to learn and predict more rapidly and more accurately about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to audience engagement.

We now have a whole new set of questions to ask, and a whole new set of opportunities to pursue. And those opportunities require marketers and salespeople — equipped both with human judgment and knowledge of AI as a tool — to pursue them. We can glimpse (see what I did there?) a new horizon for customer understanding and connection. But to get there, we’ll have to do some work together.

One thing is clear: The most effective sales and marketing teams of the future will embed generative AI into the fabric of everything they do.

In recent years, there’s been a common misconception that Gen Z and millennials are essentially the same.

When companies discuss reaching younger audiences, many often lump Gen Z and millennials into the same group and create one campaign strategy that they believe fits both groups.

Sure, many millennials and Gen Zers are considered “young adults.” Both generations are highly connected to technology and the internet. It might seem effective to run one campaign aimed at both generations, but is this really the right move?

To investigate, I decided to start by letting consumers weigh in on whether or not the same marketing strategies will engage both age groups.

In a Lucid poll, I asked 350 people to tell me if, “The same marketing tactics that persuade millennials also work on Gen Z,” was a true or false statement. And if you think consumers — the people who are being marketed to by brands — would sway one way or another, you’ll be slightly surprised by the results below:

Data Source: Lucid Software

Although 56% of those polled thought the two generations could be marketed to the same way, nearly half disagreed.

As a marketer specializing in audience growth, I sway with the 44% of people who think the same tactics won’t work on both groups — at least not forever.

But is either group of consumers right about their perceptions? In this blog post, I’ll share the cold, hard facts researchers have discovered about generational similarities and differences between millennials and Gen Zers, while occasionally weighing the raw data against the way everyday consumers perceive the two generations. And if you’re in a pinch, jump straight to the info you need:

• Factors that Differentiate Millennials and Gen Z
• How to Market to Millennials
• How to Market to Gen Z
• How to Market to Both
• Tips for Knowing Your Audience

When you think about the generational differences on the largest possible scale, the oldest millennials are in their early 40s, might be settled down, and could be making larger purchases like cars or homes. The youngest members of Gen Z are 11 years old, might love children’s shows, and won’t be directly making purchasing decisions any time soon.

Aside from the obvious age differences above, here are six more factors that make these two generations fundamentally different.

Factors That Differentiate Millennials and Gen Z

1. They have different attitudes about technology and money.

Understanding the era an age group grows up in can help you identify generational commonalities like motivations, spending or saving habits, or pain points that they all share.

Two things that differentiated each generation’s childhood era included technology and the economy:

Technology

The most obvious difference between the eras each generation was raised in is the presence of technology. Millennials grew up using DVD players, giant personal computers, cell phones with tiny screens, and dial-up internet. At that time, we thought these technologies were groundbreaking.

Now, most children and teens within Gen Z have access to iPads, smartphones, endless Wi-Fi, or streaming services that put our prized DVD players to shame. Many members of this generation might have also grown up in households with early smart home technology.

While millennials watched innovation begin, Gen Z was immersed in it from day one.

But although Gen Z never had to know a time where they didn’t have a cool gadget to solve basic problems, the impact of technology, the internet, and social media has still taken a toll on the group.

Research shows that Gen Z — which has been called the “socially-conscious generation — deals with far more body image, mental health, and cyberbullying issues than any other age group has in the past. Experts have also called Gen Z the loneliest generation despite all of their digital connectivity options.

Economy

Millennials and Gen Z also have different attitudes around money. While they both care about their finances and invest in things that can improve their careers — like higher education.

Both generations are known for improving on financial habits of past generations, however, millennials put their money into buying more products or services that will give them a positive experience, while Gen Z is more focused on savings and practical products.

Millennials in the U.S. built up their own finances shortly after the Recession, which ended in 2009. For many years up until 2019, despite financial woes caused by the poor economy, rising home costs, and high unemployment levels, millennials remained optimistic about their future and finances. However, some studies state that millennials’ financial optimism is dwindling due to post-pandemic inflation, recession, and market slump prevalent in 2023.

Gen Z was born at the beginning of the economic downturn. As the oldest members of Gen Z have entered adulthood, research shows that their past experience of living in the Recession are leading them to make more practical spending decisions.

If you’re marketing to these generations, you’ll want to remember these attitudes about money.

For example, if you want millennials to buy your product, you’ll want to focus on building a brand that offers a pleasant or entertaining customer experience, as well as marketing products or services that give instant gratification. If you’re marketing to Gen Z, you’ll want your campaigns to clearly demonstrate how or why your product will be valuable or practical to them in their daily lives.

2. Gen Z is more likely to make mobile purchases.

By now, you might know that both of these generations are heavily connected to the internet and social media, While millennials watched the internet develop, Gen Z has used it since a very young age.

Each day, millennials spend around 7.5 hours online while Gen Z surfs for nearly 10 hours.

Both millennials and Gen Z also go online primarily with mobile devices, but a big difference between these generations is that Gen Z was practically raised with smartphones. According to YPULSE, 12 is the average age Gen-Z received their first smartphone, five years younger (on average) than millennials.

Source: YPULSE

Gen Z’s mobile-first mindset also impacts how they shop. Members of the generation are twice as likely to make a mobile online purchase than millennials. However, millennials still do shop a lot on mobile devices. In fact, 71% say they do most of their online shopping with a mobile device.

Regarding online content consumption, millennials and Gen Z spend most of their time watching videos and visiting social media sites.

According to a recent study, millennials watch online videos for 1.5 hours per day while Gen Z averages over three hours. Meanwhile, both generations are thought to spend hours daily on social media.

While you might have already known that mobile optimization and video marketing are a key digital strategies, these stats prove that it can help you zone in on young adult generations. If you really want to attract attention from both Gen Z or millennials, you’ll want to create mobile videos, mobile ecommerce sites, or other phone-based experiences that cater to them. You should also be sure to market yourself on platforms that’re already mobile, such as major social media apps.

3. Both spend a lot of time on social media, but the platforms they use are quite different.

To understand how people perceived each generation’s social media usage, I asked the same group of 350 people noted in the Lucid poll above to weigh in on which group they thought spent more time on social media. Here’s what they said:

Data Source: Lucid Software

The poll results above were fairly split between millennials and Gen Z. However, 27% of participants say both generations are “always logged on.”

So, who’s actually the most tuned in to social media? Let’s see what studies on these groups reveal.

The World Economic Forum reports that millennials are logged on to social media for an average of two hours and 38 minutes daily while Gen Z logs on for more than four hours each day.

Aside from the time spent on social media per day, the platforms each generation uses are also slightly different.

While my generation thrived on MySpace and Tumblr and now enjoys platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, Gen Z has zoned in on video-based platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and — more recently — TikTok.

A recent Business Insider survey that polled the oldest half of Gen Z found that participants used Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat most often.

Although TikTok seemed less popular in the Business Insider survey, this one-year-old platform is one of the fastest-growing social media apps due to booming global Gen Z users.

Gen Z and millennials do have a few social platform preferences in common. One, for example, is Instagram. While Instagram is older and more established than apps like TikTok or Snapchat, it’s also pulled in millennials and video-loving Gen Z members.

YouTube is also a social network that both generations are prominently using. While YouTube was launched when most millennials were children, 96% of Gen Z users have accounts on the video-sharing platform. The video platform is also the second-most used search engine and a platform where many in Gen Z and millennial generations go for product research, as 57% of YouTube’s audience consists solely of the two generations.

4. Millennials pay attention to ads for a longer amount of time.

Each generation’s habits align well with its average attention span when it comes to content consumption.

While millennials will pay attention to content for 12 seconds, Gen Z will only focus on it for eight seconds. Furthermore, Gen Z enjoys quick or short-form video content, like that of Snapchat or Instagram Stories, while millennials value long-form content, such as detailed videos or podcasts.

This means that those advertising or marketing to millennials can get away with slightly longer or more in-depth content while those marketing to Gen Z will want to get their value proposition out as quickly and seamlessly as possible in their campaigns.

As I’ve mentioned above, most of today’s social and online platforms are becoming more video-driven. This mirrors the fact that video usage is growing quickly amongst both generations.

Whether you’re creating long-form content for millennials or short-form clips for Gen Z, you’ll want to embrace mobile-optimized video when promoting your brand to either audience.

Branded Content

When it comes to learning about brands or products on social media, each generation also has its own unique preferences. For example, Gen Z prefers to learn about products through social media-based videos and influencer marketing, while millennials will respond to a variety of promotional strategies including more traditional online ads, social media marketing, and branded podcasts.

Additionally, a recent survey shows that 87% of Gen Z prefers ads or marketing content that shows actual people discussing products. When it comes to millennials, only 37% prefer to see people discussing products in ads or marketing content.

Aside from embracing video and mobile optimization, if you’re marketing to Gen Z, you’ll also want to focus on content that feels more informative and less like an ad. This generation has actively rejected traditional advertising tactics. For example, 84% of Gen Z will skip video ads as quickly as possible, while 65% have downloaded some type of ad-blocker on their mobile devices or computers.

5. Both generations purchase less than past generations.

A common myth about millennials and Gen Z is that both generations are financially illiterate. Because this seems to be a hot topic online and throughout pop culture, I conducted one more Lucid poll, asking the same group noted above to choose which generation they thought spent more money on products.

The Lucid poll below demonstrates this myth and perception as many participants said that they believed both generation spend a lot of money:

Data Source: Lucid Software

Additionally, 36% of survey respondents said millennials spent the most on products, while the same percentage said both generations spend a lot of money. However, less than 20% pointed to Gen Z.

According to various studies, both generations actually spend less than past generations while the oldest Gen Z members are focused on responsible spending.

Most of Gen Z doesn’t even have much buying power yet. But research from multiple sources, including Vice, Insider, and Adobe say that Gen Z aims to spend money pragmatically as compared to other generations. Some analysts suggest that Gen Z’s saving approach is routed in budgeting lessons that the generation learned from the U.S. Recession.

When it comes to the Gen Z members who are old enough to make purchases, research shows that they do less online shopping than millennials. A recent study from Ernst & Young noted that 74% of millennials and only 49% of Gen Z buy products online more than once a month.

But, while Gen Z buys less online, they expect more added service from a brand when they make purchases. The same E&Y study found that 80% of Gen Z valued free delivery. The study also found that 74% of Gen Z values brands that give out discounts or coupons over other businesses.

While millennials are slightly less frugal than Gen Z, the idea that the older generation is more frivolous is also a huge misconception. While many millennials buy their fair share of products, they also earn more annually than most older generations, are the most educated age group, and are notably optimistic about their futures.

6. They have different career motivations.

Both generations have in common that they have placed importance on investing in school or skills training.

While older generations could afford both homes and education, millennials find housing out of financial reach and have mainly focused on paying high costs of tuition.

Despite increasing educational costs, the trend of investing in education isn’t expected to change for either generation. While 10% of Gen Z teens are saving for college, millennial parents are putting more into their children’s college funds than past generations.

Looking at each generation’s work habits can give you a sneak peek into what their finances and daily motivations might be in the future.

While both millennials and Gen Z are driven by higher education and career growth, they still have a few slight differences that you might want to know about, especially if you’re a marketer in academic or B2B fields.

Today, many millennials are working or are enrolled in higher education. For the entire decade between 2020 and 2030, millennials will comprise the largest share of the workforce, representing 40% of the global working-age population by 2030.

But, although most of Gen Z is still in school, they are also very career-minded.

When it comes to looking for jobs, Gen Z adults are more financially motivated than the millennial generation. In fact, 65% of Gen Z employees value salary over other job perks as 74% 2023 US graduates surveyed said they prioritize stability and salary from employers, outweighing factors including a known employer brand, a fast-growing field, or overall benefits. Those in the age group also say they’ll invest in skill training if it means they make more money.

Gen Z also applies for jobs more aggressively than past generations. Only 10% of the generation starts their job search after college while most Gen Z students begin scouting out job options between freshman and sophomore year.

So, what does this mean for your marketing strategy? Both of these generations are hard workers, highly educated, and might earn more than past generations.

However, Gen Z is more driven to make and save money. This means that to persuade Gen Z, you might need to take extra time to brainstorm campaigns that show how your product will help them and why it is worth their money. Odds are, they will be more persuaded by the practicality of a product than the “trendiness” of it.

How to Market to Each Generation

Yes, both generations have a lot of things in common.

And while there are opportunities to market to both generations at once, it might be more beneficial to brainstorm creative campaigns that zone in on one generation or the other. To help you develop a strategy that gains attention from the appropriate audience, here are a few takeaways related to each generation:

Marketing Campaign for Millennials

By now, you might be most familiar with marketing to millennials. Luckily, they’re also a great generation to market to. They’re on the most prominent social media networks today and prefer to consume multiple different styles of multimedia content, from videos to podcasts. They’re also old enough to make purchasing decisions, are more educated than previous generations, and spend considerable time in the research stage before buying a product.

Essentially, many different formats of marketing content will engage millennials because they are regularly looking to be enticed by a new product that will help them in their daily lives.

Because millennials have a slightly longer attention span than Gen Z, you can also get a bit more creative by testing out longer-form content like longer marketing videos or branded podcasts.

The best types of marketing campaigns will inform millennials about how your product can make their lives easier or how it can solve their day-to-day problems. Focusing your strategy on social media or online platforms like Facebook, YouTube or Instagram, where many adults go to research products can also be beneficial to your strategy,

Marketing Campaign for Gen Z

To successfully persuade Gen Z to buy your product, you’ll want to make content that quickly cuts to the chase and explains why your product will provide value to them.

As mentioned above, Gen Z loves to use video to learn about products and spends most of their online time on mobile phones. So be sure to leverage short-form video formatting and mobile-optimized content in your campaigns.

You’ll also want to zone in on the niche social media platforms that they commonly use, such as Instagram, YouTube, TikTok on Snapchat. If you’re not on one of these platforms, but still want to gain brand awareness there, consider sponsoring an influencer who knows the audience and create content that discusses your product.

Marketing Campaign for Gen Z and Millennials

If you absolutely can’t budget pinpointed campaigns for millennials and Gen Z, but know you want to market to young adults, focus on the cusp of both generations by creating a campaign for 18 to 34-year-olds. This will allow you to zone in on young and slightly older adults that can actually make purchasing decisions.

While a campaign with this age target might be slightly more favorable to millennials between 27 and 42, there’s still a chance you could grab attention from older teenagers who will soon be able to make more purchases if they can’t already.

Despite the differences between these two generations, there are also two big similarities: both love social media and instant gratification. Be sure that your campaign clearly explains why your product will be valuable to the age group you’re pitching it too, and leverage the social media networks that the age group you’re targeting has in common.

For example, if you’re focused on promoting your product to people in the 18 to 34 range, you’ll want to be on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook, because most members of this age group are using all three of them on a regular basis.

If you can create a campaign that leverages key social networks accordingly while highlighting why your product is so instantly gratifying and useful, you might attract interest from both groups fairly quickly.

Tips for Knowing Your Audience

As you create campaigns around a specific audience or age group, it’s important to do digging to learn what motivates this group of people, what their purchasing habits are, where they spend the most time, and what they’re looking for in a product. Here are a few tips that can help you in this research:

• Identify specific demographics: Try not to be too specific or too broad. Pick an audience you can learn a lot about quickly that well aligns with your product and start researching that demographic.
• Learn about their work and education backgrounds: This will give you insight on what motivates them and how much they’re able to spend on a product.
• Find out which social platforms they use: Once you do this, you can research each platform and leverage it appropriately during your campaign.
• Consider writing a buyer persona: A buyer persona is a fictional character that has a very similar lifestyle to your ideal buyer. Having a persona in mind can help you quickly think about campaigns and strategies that they’ll engage most with. It’s also a handy place to organize all of your detailed research findings into one simple place.

Want to learn more about Gen Z or millennials specifically? Check out this blog post on marketing to Gen Z or this piece on millennial marketing.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in December 2019 and has since been updated for comprehensiveness.

You’ll need a solid technical marketing strategy if you sell a complex product or service.

This type of marketing requires a firm understanding of the technical aspects behind your product. You’ll also need to communicate complex processes clearly. Without technical expertise, your marketing team will have a difficult time developing content that resonates with your core audience.

In this post, we’ll look at why technical marketing is so important, as well as the skills necessary to succeed in a technical marketing role.

Table of Contents

• When to Use Technical Marketing
• Technical Marketing Best Practices
• 7 Tips to Kickstart Your Career in Technical Marketing

What is technical marketing?

Technical marketing refers to a specific type of marketing focusing primarily on an offering’s specifications and technical aspects.

Technical marketing communicates and simplifies complex information, usually about specialized products.

When to Use Technical Marketing

Technical marketing is a crucial part of any marketing strategy. It’s particularly important to use when consumers are very knowledgeable about the subject matter and have a detailed understanding of the product or service.

A general overview may work for some industries or products. But for someone who knows the ins and outs of your industry already, they’ll want more in-depth information.

A few industries that benefit from technical marketing the most include:

• Software
• Manufacturing
• Healthcare
• Aerospace
• Electronics

Within these industries, there are some scenarios when technical marketing is most beneficial in helping marketing teams communicate with customers, generate quality leads, and meet their business goals.

User Manuals

Technical marketing details how a product or service works. These marketers specifically focus on how the offering will benefit the user.

This is typically more necessary in technical fields where the products are more complex, such as engineering or electronics.

A user manual, also referred to as a user guide or instruction manual, is documentation that provides a user with a detailed explanation of how to use a product or service.

Software Programs and Applications

Another crucial use case for technical marketing is creating documentation for software programs and applications.

This can include documentation for developers, as well as customer-facing documentation for product-savvy consumers.

Assembly Instructions

If you’ve ever had to build a piece of IKEA furniture, then you know that simplifying complex processes can significantly affect the user experience.

This use case is unique to products that need to be constructed or assembled, such as manufacturing parts, electronics, or furniture.

Help Articles

Help center articles, product walk-through videos, and anything else that provides in-depth instruction all fall under how-to content.

You’ll need technical writing experience, critical thinking skills, and product insights to produce this technical marketing content.

Technical Marketing Best Practices

Understand your audience.

Marketing is all about understanding your audience’s needs and pain points to navigate them toward a useful solution.

Yet typically, this form of marketing will require an even greater dose of creativity, with a need to continually search for new avenues to make technical and complex products and services easy to understand.

Whether you’re a technical marketing manager or a technical writer, you will need a complete understanding of a product or service’s USPs, capabilities, and benefits. And this should outweigh the customer’s understanding. No questions should be left unanswered.

Technical marketing requires in-depth audience research and critical thinking. You must be able to think like your customer so you know how to communicate with them in a way that will resonate, educate, and drive leads.

Sharpen your industry knowledge.

To excel in technical marketing, it’s essential to understand the ins and outs of the industry. Stay on top of the latest developments, trends, and tools. Then, you’ll know what your audience is consuming.

Sharpening your industry knowledge is beneficial in helping you better understand your customer and position your brand as an expert in your field.

This can also give your online presence a boost. How?

Google’s latest update — referred to as EEAT — prioritizes content that demonstrates four things:

• Experience
• Expertise
• Authoritativeness
• Trustworthiness

This is a huge opportunity for technical marketers to use content to build their brand’s authority on a certain topic or product.

Create content that covers technical aspects of a service or product and demonstrates your company as an expert in the space. If it’s done properly, then this will improve your search rankings.

Get product training.

When you’re new to your role or company, the first thing you should do is get in-depth training on your company’s product.

Meet with someone on the product or engineering team to walk through the product’s front end and back end since you’ll want to experience the product as both a user and as an internal member.

By walking through the user experience, you can identify any technical aspects that could use better marketing or more thorough communication.

On the flip side, it’s also essential for a technical marketer to fully understand how a product or process works in order to translate that information to the end user throughout your marketing efforts.

Lean into storytelling.

While technical marketing may revolve around data, detailed specifications, and thorough instruction, that doesn’t mean you can’t also infuse storytelling elements into your content.

Lean into the “marketing” aspect that goes into technical marketing. Don’t be afraid to get creative when crafting your content.

Put yourself in the user’s shoes to better understand their perspective and help you tell a story. Telling a story not only helps communicate complex topics, but it’s also a great way to help users visualize themselves using your product.

7 Tips to Kickstart Your Career in Technical Marketing

So what does it take to have a successful technical marketing career? There are certainly some key characteristics necessary for this role, and some definite skills to hone.

Here are seven tips to help kickstart your career as a marketer in a technical field.

1. Choose the role you want to focus on.

If you’re thinking about a career in technical marketing, there are several roles you can hone in on.

Whether you’re experienced in the strategy side or consider yourself more of a technical wordsmith, here are a few roles you can expect to find in a technical marketing career path.

Technical Marketing Manager

This role encompasses all of the technical marketing activities for an organization. It’s essential that a technical marketing manager has wider business knowledge to understand the ROI for the specific product, as well as the product’s use cases.

Broad industry knowledge is also a must, with an understanding of complementary or substitute products on the market.

For example, if you think about your prospect’s existing subscriptions or tool stack, a detailed overview of the specifications and limitations of your product will highlight where your offering will complement or overlap with their existing tools.

Technical Content Marketer

This role focuses more specifically on ways to use content to communicate your technical message.

Technical Marketing Writer

A technical marketing writer is responsible for communicating the overall marketing and messaging strategies to paper (or video, as the case may be).

As a writer, your content will be the driving force behind generating more qualified leads. It’s essential to understand the industry jargon your customer uses.

2. Harness your public speaking skills.

This may be unexpected, but public speaking is an incredibly important skill in technical marketing.

Given that the content that tends to perform well are conferences, videos, and presentations, a technical marketer must be able to communicate technical aspects in this thought leadership setting.

Whether you need to walk through the product for a demo or you’re hosting a webinar for potential customers, get yourself used to speaking (even if it’s in a virtual environment) if you want to succeed in technical marketing.

3. Improve your business sense.

It’s essential that a technical marketing manager or strategist has wider business knowledge. This helps you understand the ROI for the specific product but also the product’s use cases.

Wider industry knowledge is also a must, with a particular understanding of complementary or substitute products on the market.

For example, if you think about your prospect’s existing subscriptions or tool stack, a detailed overview of the specifications and limitations of your product will highlight where your offering will complement or overlap with their existing tools.

With more involvement in business operations, your concrete understanding of your product’s specifications will be necessary to better explain where the features are adding value.

Best for: If you want to lead a technical marketing team and equip them with the budget and resources needed to get results, you have to get buy-in from executives. This means you must be able to communicate the value of your program and be able to show how it’s impacting the company’s business goals and bottom line.

4. Become a problem solver.

Ultimately, technical marketing is all about helping consumers solve their problems.

To succeed in a technical marketing career, it’s important to be consultative and empathetic. This allows you to explore and further advise a prospect’s decision-making processes by continually looking at specific needs.

Best for: If you have your sights set on a management or leadership role at some point in your marketing career, then you have to improve your problem-solving skills.

5. Improve your communication skills.

From writing in-depth user guides to crafting video script copy for demos, technical marketers must always work on their communication skills to succeed in this career — particularly when it comes to written communication.

As we mentioned, you need to understand your personas from a content platform perspective, but you’ll also need to know how to write for them.

This includes tone of voice: is it appropriate to write it simplistically? Or will it be more fitting to include industry jargon?

Your brand’s content needs to live and breathe the product or service it’s related to and the audience that desires it. Whether this be through product descriptions, web pages, or more general industry-related content that will drive traffic, excellent communication skills are essential.

Best for: If you want to pursue a role in technical writing, then excellent communication skills are a must.

6. Hone your research skills.

To kickstart your technical marketing career, you’ll also need strong research skills. Being an excellent researcher is important for a couple of reasons.

For one, research helps you gather the most up-to-date knowledge on wider market trends. Being a researcher also helps you with the ability to retain and communicate your learnings to consumers, and showcase it in communication such as user guides.

Pro tip: Join online communities and discussion forums to connect with people in the industry and stay on top of the latest conversations.

7. Be open to training.

Another content form that lends itself well to technical marketing is training courses on the products and services offered. If your company wants to produce this type of content, then great training skills are necessary, both for online and in-person technical training.

Practice your training skills by producing video walk-throughs and getting comfortable explaining complex processes or products in person instead of on paper.

Pro tip: You should also receive regular training on your company’s product and industry-related topics. Attending training sessions or courses can help you better refine your own training skills.

Taking the Technical Marketing Leap

Ultimately, technical marketing can be a really important component of your content marketing strategy if your industry or products and services lend themselves to it.

Technical marketing can help you attract more qualified leads and showcase your company as an expert in the industry.

Create a clear technical marketing strategy so that you can cut through the marketing noise and deliver an exciting and engaging message to your well-informed audience.

If you’ve ever come across a valuable article or website that can help improve your skills as a marketer, you probably want to save it and come back when you can dedicate more time to it.

With social bookmarking, you can save those articles or resources you want to revisit in one central location.

Let’s review:

• What is Social Bookmarking?
• How Social Bookmarking Works
• Benefits of Social Bookmarking
• Top Bookmarking Sites
• How to Use Social Bookmarking

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When I was working at an agency, it was important to learn everything I could about SEO and drive results for our clients. But I was no SEO expert.

In order to keep our SEO tactics competitive, I kept this SEO definitive guide bookmarked so I could come back to it whenever I was strategizing for a client’s SEO. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, this was a form of social bookmarking.

Bookmarks can be public, private, or shared with specific groups. Social bookmarking sites can also be used like social search engines. You can search and browse to see popular and recently added web pages. Users can comment and vote for web pages they like, making it easy to see what articles are most valuable.

Want to learn more about improving your skills as a marketer? Check out our list of online marketing classes.

How Social Bookmarking Works

Social bookmarking works by clipping or tagging a web page using a platform or tool so that you can come back to it later. We’re familiar with using bookmarks in our search browsers, but social bookmarking allows us to instead keep the collection of web pages accessible from any device online, as long as we have a connection to the internet. It’s like having your own highly curated search engine.

On social bookmarking platforms, topics are organized into specific groups or threads where users can follow content that’s most relevant to them. Once you opt to follow a particular topic thread or piece of content, you’ll be notified when new information or updates appear.

This efficient categorization makes it easy to discover new content of interest or share content of your own.

Social Bookmarking Benefits

For marketers, social bookmarking offers another avenue to not only get out branded content, but discover trends, too. In addition to following threads, you can search by words or phrases, plugging in information most relevant to your brand.

For example, if your brand is in the wellness industry, you can use social bookmarking discussions to see what users are talking about in that space. Plus it gives an opportunity to interact with users who fit your target audience and publish content of your own.

Other benefits include:

• An SEO opportunity to earn backlinks from a platform with a high domain authority to give your content a boost in the SERPs.
• Opportunities to network with influencers or collaborators to help grow your online presence and attract the attention of potential new customers.
• Ability to easily distribute content, examples, and ideas to your team for inspiration.

While social bookmarking platforms are an excellent avenue to use to get the word out about your brand, spamming links is frowned upon. Going overboard can result in the platform penalizing you and losing credibility with your audience. Only share links when they are actually of use to your audience.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s check out the top social bookmarking sites to get started.

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1. Pinterest

Price: Free

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Pinterest is a social media network that operates like a social bookmarking site. You can create boards and save content (called pinning) to come back to later. For example, if you are getting married, you can have a “Wedding Hair” board and save pins that you find for different hair styles.

A unique feature with Pinterest is that they collaborate directly with sellers, so you can buy the products you find directly through Pinterest. Users enjoy Pinterest because they can save content and ideas for parties, events, recipes and gifts.

2. Reddit

Price: Free

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Reddit is one of the top most visited sites and it’s also one of the best social news aggregators around. Reddit users join discussions and submit content to the site which is then voted either up or down by members.

With this platform marketers should take extra care not to spam links. Too much commercial or self-promo will result in being shadowbanned. Use Reddit the way regular members would and you shouldn’t have any problems.

3. Pocket

Price: Free; paid options available

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Pocket is a social bookmarking site that lets you save articles, videos, or stories from any publication or web page. With the paid version of Pocket, you can annotate, highlight, and add notes to pieces you’re reading.

A unique feature of Pocket is that you can pick up right where you left off. It saves your place and brings you right to the section of the article you were reading before closing out. Additionally, articles are saved in Pocket even if the web page or article gets taken down. You will still have that article in your database.

4. Digg

Price: Free

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Digg is a news aggregator site that features articles in science, technology, and current events. With each article, you can like, bookmark, or share on social media. You can also publish your own articles on Digg to share with the community. Additionally, Digg curates content by top stories, so you can see what’s trending online.

5. Mix

Price: Free

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Mix is a social bookmarking site where you can save content for later. To get started, you choose things you’re interested in, such as travel, pop culture, or food, and then it curates content for your feed.

Additionally, you can also follow people you know or coworkers so the articles they save show up on your feed. This is a great way for colleagues to share resources and see what coworkers recommend reading. With your profile, you can create collections to organize your saved posts by category.

6. Scoop.it

Price: Free; paid options available

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Scoop.it is a social bookmarking site that specializes in researching and publishing content for individuals and businesses. A unique feature is how Scoop.it works with businesses.

You can publish on your websites and blogs, newsletters, and social media directly through Scoop.it. It will aggregate curated content for you across multiple WordPress blogs. Additionally, the private hubs allow employees to share articles privately. Scoop.it will also suggest content for you based on your previous interaction.

7. Medium

Price: Free; paid options available

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Medium is an online publishing platform and social bookmarking site where you can publish and save posts to read later. On Medium, you can favorite different topics, writers, and publications to personalize your feed. Below an article, you can clap for it (like favoriting it), and find out more about the author and organization associated with the piece.

8. Slashdot

Price: Free

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Slashdot is similar to Reddit in that it is designed as a social news site. It features news stories on current events and industries including entertainment, science, and technology. Users can comment and save each story. Stories are tagged, so you can filter through and search for stories on a particular topic.

In addition to these seven social bookmarking sites, there are also plenty more options to consider. Below is our list of honorable mentions:

1. Dribbble

2. We Heart It

3. Folkd

4. A2Z Bookmarks

5. Feedly

6. Crazybacklink

7. Skybacklinks

8. Zypid

9. Metafilter

10. BizSugar

11. Flipboard

12. Sociopost

13. Disqus

14. Trendiee

15. Blinklist

16. BibSonomy

17. Diigo

18. SiteBar

19. Pearltrees

How to Use Social Bookmarking Sites

1. Content Curation

As a marketer, especially in social media, one of your duties is to curate content to share with your audience. People look to your brand for resources and expertise in your industry. With a social bookmarking site, you can save articles or resources you find online so you never run out of content to share with your audience. Social bookmarking saves time and gives you the ability to schedule content ahead of time.

For example, below is content I have curated on my personal Pinterest page for recipes. If any of my followers are looking for recipes (especially keto or low-carb), I have an entire board dedicated to curating content in that category.

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2. Organize and Save Resources

A benefit to social bookmarking sites is that you can organize and save content that you want to revisit later. As a marketer, it’s important to keep track of resources that help you develop professionally. Using a site where you can keep these resources organized is helpful, so you won’t lose valuable content.

3. Tag Content

With most social bookmarking sites, you can “tag“ content, meaning you can label it. For example, if there’s a blog post that is about YouTube SEO strategies, you can “tag” that content as “YouTube.” Then, when you want to go back and look for that article or you need resources for YouTube, you have a section in your social bookmarking account tagged YouTube. This keeps the resources you save organized and readily available.

4. Share Resources

Another way to use social bookmarking tools is to share content with your team. As a marketer, if you find an article about social media strategy, you can tag the content as “Social Media” so your social media team can find it. Plus, if everyone on your team has access to the social bookmarking site, they can regularly check in to find the resources they need. This is helpful for employees to continue developing their career and also share things they learn with their colleagues.

For example, in Pocket, you can “tag“ content. On the left-hand side of your profile, you can click the “Tags” category to pull up specific articles.

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5. Build Backlinks

Social bookmarking sites can be a great addition to your link building strategy. You can use your profile to bookmark resources on your website. However, you shouldn’t only add bookmarks to your site.

Use social bookmarking as you normally would, bookmarking other resources you come across, but sprinkle in a post or two from your own site. While social bookmarking shouldn’t be your sole link building strategy, it can round out your current strategy.

6. Promote Your Mentions

Besides bookmarking articles on your own site, you can also use social bookmarking to link to articles or blog posts that mention your company. However, your social bookmarking profile should contain a variety of self-promotion versus unbranded content.

7. Drive Traffic to Your Site

Social bookmarking sites can drive traffic to your site. If people bookmark your post and vote for it, it will show up in searches, and lead to traffic to your site.

Besides sharing your own posts on your social bookmarking profile, you also want other people to bookmark your content. To make this easy for users, you can add social bookmarking buttons to your blog so readers can bookmark your content with the click of a button.

In the example below, writer Nicole Peeler drives traffic to her website through the content she creates on Medium. Below her post, she has her website, her Medium profile, and the organization profile linked. If users like her post, they can easily find out more information with the links below the article.

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8. SEO

Search engines often list results from social bookmarking sites. When a site is bookmarked on a social bookmarking site, a link is made and indexed by search engines. This earns credibility with search engines. Content that is voted for and bookmarked a lot by users on social bookmarking sites tends to show up higher in search engine results.

Social Bookmarking Aids Marketing Efforts

Social bookmarking can help develop your team and keep your marketing skills sharp in an evolving industry. Plus, it can also be used as a strategy for your team to gain more traffic and credibility with Google.

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

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Lots of times, when marketers want to make a big impact on their marketing, they focus on going after a big project: big email campaigns, big website redesigns, big social media plans, big everything.

But while big projects can have big payoffs, you don’t have all the time in the world to execute them. You’ve got lots of other things on your plate — the only free time you have left in your day is the 43 minutes on Wednesday between scarfing down your bagged lunch and your weekly 1:00 p.m. client call. 

Yeah … not a lot of time for those big campaigns, huh? 

The good news is you don’t need them to make a big impact on your marketing — often, a smaller tweak can work wonders. And one of the smallest changes you can implement with the biggest splash is call-to-action (CTA) revamps. On our own CTAs, we’ve seen small changes yield 30% increase in conversion … which is no chump change. 

So if you only have a few minutes in your week to optimize your conversion rates, souping up your out-of-date and gnarly looking calls-to-action is the way to go. To be sure you aren’t forgetting any crucial components of CTAs, be sure to follow along with the checklist below. 

11 Essential Elements of an Effective Call-to-Action

To help demonstrate the anatomy of a well-crafted CTA, we’re going to pick apart the primary CTA we recently featured in a blog post about the biggest problem in your PR. 

1) Use actionable language. 

HubSpot’s CTA tool helps you create click-worthy CTAs.

In grade school, you were probably told that writing in the second person (writing to “you”) wasn’t ideal. 

Forget that lesson immediately. 

When you’re designing CTAs, effective copy all boils down to using action-oriented, second-person verbs. Use verbs like “discover, unearth, find” instead of ones like “be smarter.” In the CTA below, notice how we began sentences with “Learn” and “Download.” Besides empowering your readers a tad to click on your CTA, you’re also shortening your copy — which all boils down to a more effective and concise call-to-action. 

According to AJ Beltis, Senior Content Marketing Manager for HubSpot’s Acquisition team, succinctness pays off for CTA copy. “I’ve found that direct CTA copy tends to perform better than lengthier CTA copy. Succinctly pitching the value of what you’re linking out to on a page with an abundance of copy and visual distractions can act as an unambiguous directive on what readers should do once on the page.” Create authoritative and click-worthy CTAs with HubSpot’s CTA tool. 

2) Align CTA copy with landing page copy.

When you’re creating CTA copy, you also want to make sure your CTA copy and your landing page copy align. The name of the thing you are promoting — whether it’s a free ebook, whitepaper, template, guide, crash course, or presentation — should align with the name of it on the landing page.

You should also be calling the offer the same thing on both the CTA and the landing page. For example, if you mention that people can download a crash course on Facebook advertising on the CTA, you shouldn’t call it an ebook on the landing page. It may seem like small potatoes, but those details matter. 

On the landing page that goes with the CTA above, we did both of these things — notice how the title of the offer and how we position it is the exact same as the CTA. This way, when people get to the landing page, they aren’t confused about what we’re offering and click away. 

3) Include a clear value proposition.

Each call-to-action you create is unique to your business — it’s your offer, service, or product you’re trying to promote. But that’s not how users perceive it. When they come in contact with your CTAs, they wonder why they should download that very offer from you at this specific moment. They might wonder if they’ve already downloaded something similar from your competitor. Or maybe they are just confused about value you’re going to bring to them in exchange for their email. 

Either way, you’ve got to quell these suspicions by making the benefit of clicking on the CTA super clear. On your CTA, give a quick description of what happens when they click on it — will they magically become better at their job? Will they save time? Will they end up saving humanity from a pack of zombies? Regardless of what you want them to do, it should be very what is going to happen when people click.

On our CTA below, you can see this principle in action. In both the headline and the description, we describe what people will get when they click and how they will be able to use it — which helps readers trust us and differentiate us from other companies’ offers. 

4) Play up its time-sensitivity.

People are busy online. While they are browsing your website, blog, or social media accounts, they’re also probably fielding emails, taking a client call, and maybe drafting a tweet of their own. With all of these potential distractions, you want to keep your readers focused on clicking your CTA. 

The best way to do that is to tap into the element of urgency and tell people to do something right now. One way to do that is to add words like “now” or “today” to your CTA button (that’s what we did in the example below). Just reminding people to do something now can increase the chance of them actually doing it now. 

5) Make it big. 

In the land of calls-to-action, the motto is go big or go home. You can’t make a tiny little button that appears at the bottom of the page and hope that people will click on it — chances are, people are going to miss it when they’re glossing over your site in an F-shaped pattern.

To make sure that people notice your CTA, you’ve got to have it large and in charge on your site. For example, the CTA we’re talking about here is the full width of the blog post body column — about 650 pixels wide. That way, there’s no way in hell you’re going to gloss over it. That being said, there’s no industry standard for the smallest size a CTA can be, so you’ve got to test how the size affects conversions on your own.

6) Create a highly contrasting design.

Another way to attract your visitors’ attention is through the actual design of your button. You can forget another lesson here: calls-to-action shouldn’t blend in with the rest of your website design. Yes, you can use similar styling — fonts and colors can still match your style guide — but the way you combine these elements should make the design pop from the rest of the page. 

Check out our CTA to see what I mean. We use our brand colors (orange, slate grey, white, and blue) and our font family (Proxima Nova) to make the CTA look like it’s part of the HubSpot family … but the way we put the CTA together makes it pop. The blue CTA background contrasts nicely against a white blog post background, and the grey button with white text and outline on top of it all grabs your attention even more. These contrasting elements were strategically chosen to help our readers notice this CTA.

7) Make the button look clickable.

Most things you can click online look like they can be clicked. Usually, they have some sort of shading or contouring that makes them look like a button you could press in real life. So if you want your CTAs to be clicked, it makes sense to make it look like something people are already familiar with clicking … right? Use your design program to add shadows and borders to not only give your CTA an extra design finish — but also make it look functional. 

We did that in our CTA in the “Download Ebook + Template Now” button. Notice how the button looks almost 3D? That’s because of a nifty little tool in PowerPoint that adds depth to 2D objects. Definitely experiment with which “clickable designs” work best for your CTAs — they could drastically improve your conversion rate.

8) Add alt text.

Despite the web becoming more and more reliant on visuals to communicate, lots of people still have problems displaying images in their browsers. Sometimes, they just have errors loading your images in your browser, while other times, they may purposefully block them from appearing — and in either instance, you need to have a backup plan. Alt text allows you to display text whenever a CTA doesn’t appear properly in a website or email. (Bonus: Because alt text is, you know … text, search engines can actually read it — spelling additional SEO juice for you.)

In our CTA below, we’ve included the alt text “inbound pr cta” to help direct those who can’t view images. Granted, it’s probably not the most engaging alt text, but it does give people and search engines an indication of what should have appeared in that image’s place. 

9) Place your CTA prominently on your website.

Once you’ve finished all the copy and design, it’s time to start putting that baby to work on your website. Whether you’re placing it above the fold (where it generally will get more clicks and conversions) or below the fold (where you can get higher quality of leads converting), you want your CTA to be noticed. So put it where it can get noticed — heck, draw even more eyeballs to it by adding directional cues so you get more clicks and conversions.

In the example we’ve been using, our primary call-to-action is featured at the bottom of every blog post. Notice how the size and design go hand-in-hand with placement — because it’s placed at the bottom of the post, we really need to ramp up the size and eye-catching design components. See how much more prominent it is compared to the paragraphs above it?

Beltis adds that the CTA should not be buried. “If the CTA is hidden too far below-the-fold or blends in with the rest of a page’s contents, it’s likely the CTA may be overlooked. That’s why in some situations it’s appropriate to have multiple CTAs,” he said. “The key here is to find the right balance of CTA placements to ensure an optimal conversion rate without coming off as spammy, hurting your brand, or detracting from the user experience.”

10) A/B test multiple CTAs to find the best performer.

Once you’ve got one CTA set, don’t stop. Chances are, you have even more opportunities to convert leads and customers through your CTAs — even if you’ve optimized them using the tips in this blog post. So keep tweaking copy, design, sizing, placement, etc. until you find a CTA that performs above the rest. 

To be honest, we didn’t A/B test this specific CTA because we were focusing on optimizing it per the next action item, but we frequently A/B test new CTAs on the blog and in emails. Let’s say we did A/B test it though — below is an example of a test we could run.

Version A:

Version B:

11) Personalize CTAs for different segments of your audience.

Besides A/B testing, you can also tailor CTAs to only appear to select audiences. For example, your visitors can see one thing, your leads can see another, and your customers can see something else altogether. To be honest, you’ll need the right software to do this (HubSpot customers: You’ve covered on this point if you’re a Pro or Enterprise account) but if you have the software, you’re golden. 

We do this all the time on our blog — if you look at the CTA below, you might see a CTA for creating CTA templates (meta, I know) or a CTA for demoing HubSpot’s landing pages. So the example CTA we’ve been using is no different. 

What leads see:

What everyone else sees:

Ultimately, by testing and optimizing and testing again, you’ll figure out which CTA best practices work for you — and which don’t — all in the sliver of time you have free each week.

What have you learned while optimizing CTAs on your own website? Share your insights with us in the comments!

Image credit: D+J+

Your customers, leads, and audience members want valuable content from your business. And that content needs to reach audience members in a way that feels natural and organic versus being disruptive. Content marketing helps businesses do this, and it describes the process of attracting, engaging with, and delighting your target markets.

By honing in on effective content marketing, you can do just that — and as a result, increase conversions, improve brand awareness, boost revenue, establish yourself as an industry leader, and more.

Whether you’re just starting to devise a strategy or you’re refreshing your existing one, it never hurts to re-assess your process and come up with new ways to create and share the content your audiences want. In this guide, we’ll give you a birds-eye-view of content marketing, types of content marketing, content marketing examples, and how to get a strategy going.

Content Marketing

The definition of content marketing is simple: It’s the process of publishing written and visual material online with the purpose of attracting more leads to your business. These can include blog posts, pages, ebooks, infographics, videos, and more.

However, content marketing isn’t just publishing a thin piece of content and hoping people will find it. It’s about purposefully tailoring your pages, videos, ebooks, and posts to your target audience so that they find you the inbound way rather than the outbound way.

Today, outbound marketing strategies (or anything that interrupts your audience members) aren’t as effective at resonating with and converting audience members as they once were.

Today, your content needs to reach your audience in a way that feels natural (a.k.a. inbound). A common way of doing this is by creating a narrative for your content — or telling a story. In doing so, your content will feel more authentic, engaging, and tailored to your audience.

So, what defines content marketing anyway?

Why is content marketing important?

2022 HubSpot research says that 70% of companies use content marketing.

Content marketing is valuable because it:

• Educates your leads and prospects about the products and services you offer. According to 2023 HubSpot research, 29% of marketers use a blog or website for lead attraction and conversion.
• Boosts conversions.
• Builds relationships between your customers and business that result in increased loyalty, and 30% of marketers are creating content that reflects brand values.
• Shows your audience how your products and services solve their challenges
• Creates a sense of community around your brand.

Now let’s look at the various types of content marketing.

Types of Content Marketing

There are many types of content marketing that you may choose to incorporate into your strategy — here are some of the most common:

1. Online Content Marketing

Online content marketing refers to any material you publish online, but more specifically, it refers to your web pages. A strong online content marketing strategy will help you rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and get you in front of the right people at the right time.

HubSpot’s home page is one example, immediately engaging visitors with specific content about our products.

2. Social Media Content Marketing

With over 4.5 billion global social media users, it’s easy to understand why so many businesses invest in social media marketing. There are many platforms (such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snapchat) to work with, and several ways you can create and share content on each of them (such as photos, live videos, pre-recorded videos, stories).

Featured Resource: Social Media Content Calendar

3. Infographic Content Marketing

Infographics display content, information, and data in an easy-to-understand, graphic format. With a mix of simple wording, short statements, and clear images, infographics are a great way to effectively communicate your content. They work well if you’re trying to simplify an educational or complex topic so all audience members can understand it.

Featured Resource: 15 Free Infographic Templates

4. Blog Content Marketing

Blogs are a powerful type of inbound content and allow for a lot of creativity in terms of their purpose and topic. With a blog, you can do things like promote other internal and external content and blog articles with links, add social share buttons, and incorporate product information.

Featured Resource: Start a Successful Blog

5. Podcast Content Marketing

More than 60 million people listen to podcasts across the Spotify and Apple Podcasts platforms. For this reason, many businesses and media outlets have begun creating and sharing their own podcasts.

Podcasts allow for a lot of creativity as they can be about any topic of choice. Additionally, you decide other factors related to the podcast such as cadence of episodes, who’s on the podcast, where you advertise the podcast, and how long episodes are.

Featured Resource: How to Start a Podcast

6. Video Content Marketing

According to Wyzowl research, 73% of consumers say they prefer to learn about a brand’s product or service through video. Additionally, video marketing can boost conversions, improve ROI, and help you build relationships with audience members. You may choose to share your video content on social media platforms, landing pages, or on a co-marketer’s website.

Featured Resource: The Ultimate Video Marketing Starter Pack

6. Paid Ad Content Marketing

Paid ads can help you reach a broad audience and allow you to position yourself in all the places you want to be seen — paid ads are especially beneficial when paired with inbound marketing. There are many places you can share paid ads including on social media, landing pages, banners, and sponsored content.

Featured Resource: The Ultimate Google Ads PPC Kit

Next, let’s talk about how content marketing works, and look at some content marketing examples.

How does content marketing work?

Content marketers attract an audience with compelling stories and by sharing valuable information. They also use content channels to build community.

So, content marketing for business isn’t just a technique or strategy, but a unique form of communication. With that in mind, people have different needs at different stages in the buying process. To make sure that your content meets a need at every stage, you’ll want to think about your conversion funnel.

Top of the Funnel (TOFU)

At the top of the funnel, you want to build awareness with your content. Your target audience might know they have a problem, but they aren’t sure how to solve it. At this stage, you can focus on brand awareness, broad pain points, and common questions.

TOFU content should pull potential customers in to help them better understand a specific problem. This gives you a relevant opportunity to introduce them to your solution.

Common challenges for TOFU content include competition, balancing educational and promotional content, and tracking ROI.

To address these issues, create a content strategy that grabs the attention of a specific audience. Your strategy will also help you create a plan that aligns content topics and formats with business goals. Then, create a list of KPIs to track your content performance.

Useful content types at the top of the funnel include:

• Blog posts
• Social media posts
• Short-form video
• Podcasts
• Infographics
• Checklists
• Ebooks
• Webinars
• Video Ads

Middle of the Funnel (MOFU)

Once a prospect passes to the middle of the funnel, they’re considering your product. They may have visited your site more than once or they’re engaging with your social media. They might have signed up for your email newsletter.

MOFU content should build a relationship with that person. At this point, they understand their problem and are comparing possible solutions. So, your content should educate them on the specifics of your solution and show how it meets their unique needs.

This is also an important moment to build trust. A prospect might not be ready to buy, so pay attention to changes in user behavior. It can be tempting to make assumptions or go for a quick conversion, but that can damage the relationship. Instead, offer in-depth information and value to nurture your lead.

Great middle-of-funnel content types include:

• Email newsletters
• Product demos
• Landing pages
• White papers
• Case studies
• Longer-form videos
• Blog posts
• Interactive content
• Webinars

You may have heard that social media is just top-of-funnel content. But more users are making purchases on social media, and it’s also a popular channel for customer service and support. So, be sure to create MOFU social posts and let prospects know that you’re ready to help them on this channel.

Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU)

Bottom-of-funnel content helps your prospect make a decision and ideally, convert. This stage focuses on conversion. So, BOFU content should make it easy to test a product, understand pricing, and make a purchase. Content that converts should drive action and create a sense of urgency. Prepare to respond to common objections and other blockers that can impact sales with your content.

Personalization can add to the impact of your content at this stage. Creating powerful CTAs is also important.

Bottom-of-funnel content types include:

• Personalized emails
• User-generated content, like customer testimonials
• Case studies
• Pricing pages
• Competitor comparison blog posts
• Video demos
• White papers
• Remarketing campaigns

Check out this post for more on how to align your content with the buyer journey.

Now, let’s look at some content marketing examples.

Content Marketing Examples

The following examples will give you a better understanding of how you can incorporate content into your greater marketing strategy.

1. Example of Instagram Content Marketing

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Glossier’s Instagram account is on-brand and complements the rest of its marketing content — even if the page didn’t say “Glossier” anywhere on the profile, customers would likely still know the profile belongs to this brand.

The Instagram page shares the Glossier product line, displays different products, and shows how each product can be used. The profile feels and looks uniquely Glossier, and depicts members of their wide customer base.

2. Example of Infographic Content Marketing

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IBM created an infographic for the future of identity. Their infographic is on-brand, well-organized, and easy to read. It clearly shares data and information about online security and how customers feel about it. It also tells audience members how they can download a more detailed report.

3. Example of Blog Content Marketing

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Expedia has a blog that shares travel-related information including hotel recommendations, great places to visit, and travel-related activities you can take part in around the globe.

Expedia regularly publishes its blog content to keep readers interested and engaged. It includes a wide range of topics related to any type of trip you could imagine.

The blog is on-brand and all articles relate to the travel technology company’s goal and mission of gaining customers and boosting brand awareness. They do this by linking to their services and writing about customers who have already had positive experiences with the company.

4. Example of Podcast Content Marketing

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Harvard Business Review (HBR) has a weekly podcast called HBR IdeaCast which features industry leaders in both business and management. You can either subscribe to consistently receive their hundreds of podcasts or pick and choose which ones you want to listen to.

The podcast is on-brand and complements the rest of HBRs published content. It also serves as a great way for HBR to connect with their target audience, enhance brand awareness, and gain a following of audience members through a medium that differs from their typical work (e.g. podcast versus HBR article).

5. Example of Video Content Marketing

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Much of Dollar Shave Club’s video content has gone viral. Their marketing efforts are on-brand, humorous, and entertaining. By establishing a name for itself via online video content, Dollar Shave Club has experienced impressive growth and brand recognition.

6. Example of Paid Ad Content Marketing

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Revolve — a clothing and accessories company — uses paid and sponsored ads on social media (like this one on Facebook) to reach their target audience while they browse their news feeds.

The content ads feature some of their products as well as details about their free shipping and return policy to drive target audience members to their site (and, hopefully, convert them into paying customers).

7. Example of Twitter Content Marketing

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HubSpot uses Twitter to market software as well as create a community among customers, target audience members, and industry leaders and experts.

HubSpot shared product information, relevant tips, industry knowledge, and original research on Twitter. HubSpot also interacts with users and makes sure anyone in need of customer support knows exactly where to go for help.

8. Example of TikTok Content Marketing

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Chipotle is an active brand on TikTok — the company uses the platform to reach and engage its customers and target audience members. In addition to reacting to others’ Chipotle-related TikTok content, the brand posts TikToks of their menu items, recipes, people enjoying their food, their restaurants, and more. They have over 2.2 million followers and over 52 million likes.

9. Example of Viral Content Marketing

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This viral content marketing example was one that came from a TikTok video — Nathan Apodaca’s original TikTok video included him sipping Ocean Spray cranberry juice while skateboarding and listening to “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac.

As a result of the viral video, TikTok used part of Apodaca’s video in their ads, Ocean Spray used Apodaca in their ads, Ocean Spray saw a bump in sales and brand awareness, Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” was number one on iTunes, and there were thousands of videos posted by other TikTok users who bought the cranberry juice and recreated Apodaca’s original video.

Now, let’s cover your content marketing strategy. By implementing a strategy, your content marketing efforts will be impactful and effective in converting leads and reaching your target audience.

Let’s dive into the steps you’ll want to work through in order to develop an effective content strategy.

1. Find your target audience.

Creating content for the broadest possible audience sounds like a good idea. But it’s hard to stand out with content that appeals to everyone.

Instead, focus on a niche of people with specific interests and needs. This can help you build a community with your content. To get started, take a look at your buyer personas.

Then, answer the following questions about your target audience to help you narrow down the right types of content for them:

• What do they need from you?
• What challenges are they looking to overcome?
• Why do they need your product or service?
• How can you help them succeed?
• Where do they spend their time?

2. Set SMART goals.

The next part of your content marketing strategy is to set SMART goals. These should be specific to your business — they’ll likely complement your broader marketing strategy and company goals.

Here are some SMART goal examples and SMART goal templates to help you get started. 

3. Determine your KPIs.

Next, set key performance indicators (KPIs) for your SMART goals. KPIs are quantifiable data points you can use to measure your actual performance against your goal.

smart goal	related kpi
Brand awareness	Site traffic, social media followers, subscription sign-ups, mentions (by customers and partners)
Revenue	Daily sales, site traffic
Conversions	Conversion rate, shopping cart abandonment rate, associated shipping rate trends, competitive price trends
Brand loyalty	Returning customers, promoters, product reviews, referrals
Customer engagement	Likes, shares, follows, mentions, backlinks
Rapport and trust	Returning customers, promoters, followers, mentions
Strategic partners	New partnerships, mentions, backlinks

4. Decide on the type of content and content formats.

Next, you want to choose the type of content you’ll create and your top content formats.

Types of content are the broad categories of content you plan to produce. Content formats are the specific presentation methods within a content type. For example, blog posts are a content type, and a blog can include content formats like listicles, how-tos, thought leadership, product reviews, and more.

To get started, run a content audit to see what kind of content is already resonating with your customers.

You may also want to do some competitive analysis and take a look at industry trends. This research can help you figure out what content strategy will work best for your business.

Then, take a look back at the various types of content we reviewed earlier and your target audience research to decide on content types and formats.

5. Choose your content channels.

Once you’ve decided on the type of content you’ll market with, it’s time to choose your specific content channels. Where will you share your content? Where will it live and be shared from?

For some of the content types, the channel you need to work with will be obvious. For example, if you’re creating Facebook content, your channel will be the social platform itself.

6. Set a budget.

Now, set your budget. Think about the type of content you’re creating and which channels you’re marketing that content on.

Then, ask yourself the following questions to figure out your budget:

• Do you need to purchase any software or technology to create the content (such as graphic design software like Adobe Photoshop, a subscription to Canva, a camera to take high-quality photos and videos)?
• Do you need to hire any content marketers or designers (such as artists, writers, editors, designers)?
• Do you need to pay for ad space?
• Do you need access to specific tools or resources to enhance or measure your specific type of content?

Make note of how your responses impact your budget — whether that’s an increase or decrease in what you may have already estimated.

7. Create a content publishing schedule.

To ensure you’re consistently producing content and sharing it with your prospects and customers, use a social media calendar or an editorial content calendar.

This will help your team stay on top of all the content your team is creating as well as allow you to schedule it ahead of time.

Use a free editorial calendar to schedule and optimize your marketing content and help boost conversions.

6. Create and distribute the content.

Create and distribute your content so your audience members can consume it — and possibly convert.

This step is about more than creating high-quality content. Keep learning to make your content as useful and engaging as you can. Practice writing headlines, make the most of the latest content trends, and build skills in the media that your audience favors.

Next, optimize your content so it’s easy for your audience to find. SEO is a useful skill for searchability. And every social media platform is unique, so check out tips to succeed on channels like Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn.

Finally, promote your content on email, social media, and more. Connect with influencers, build co-marketing partnerships, and post ads to get more eyes on your best-converting content.

9. Analyze and measure results.

Lastly, analyze and measure your results so you can make any necessary changes to enhance your content marketing efforts and reach more audience members.

Look at your SMART goals and KPIs to track the success of your content marketing strategy. Did you achieve your goals and KPIs? Were you close to reaching them, or were you off in your estimations?

Here are some tools to help you with your content marketing strategy analytics and results:

• HubSpot Marketing Analytics Software
• HubSpot Social Media Management Software
• Mention
• SharedCount
• Sprout Social
• Google Analytics

Now, how can you ensure your strategy will be effective? Let’s find out.

Traits of Effective Content Marketing

With so many companies creating and publishing content online, it’s essential to go beyond your standard industry fare. A secret? HubSpot strives to meet the following criteria to make sure all our content meets your and other readers’ needs. The result? Millions of visits to our blog posts and web pages per month.

You can achieve similar results for your company if your content:

1. Provides value beyond your product offerings.

Content marketing isn’t just about sharing your products’ virtues to get readers to become a customer. It’s important to offer value that empowers your customers to do something more efficiently, such as making their businesses more profitable or shortening their morning routine.

Whatever the case may be, strive to create content that gives a solution for your customer’s most urgent needs. Your product may be a solution, but if you’re not explicitly writing a product page, you should only incorporate product mentions if they make sense.

In the blog post below, hair care brand Curlsmith helps readers understand how to reach the right balance between high-protein and high-moisture products. It doesn’t mention its products until the very end, instead educating the reader first.

2. Targets readers’ specific buying journey stage.

Providing value and answering customers’ needs is only a part of the story. In each piece of content, you should also target your customers’ specific buyer’s journey stage.

Generally, there are three stages of the buyer’s journey: Awareness, consideration, and decision. In the awareness stage, buyers are still researching their issue. In the consideration stage, they’re researching solutions. In the decision stage, they’re about to pick a provider.

If you’re writing a “What is [X]?” post, then the person who’s reading that article is likely not ready to make a decision about their provider. They are still in the awareness stage, completing research so that they can find out who offers a solution.

Conversely, if you’re writing a product page, then the reader who visits that page has already researched potential products and found you as a possible provider. That means you should pitch your product at every turn, reiterating your value proposition and differentiating yourself from the competition. You shouldn’t be shy about your products’ most valuable features.

3. Demonstrates a consistent brand voice and image.

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No matter if you’re creating a blog post, web page, or ebook, your visitors should be able to tell who you are immediately upon consuming your content. Your brand shouldn’t sound as if ten different people are writing for you, even if that may be the case.

That’s why it’s critical to create both a writing style guide and a brand style guide. Both of these documents will confirm that:

• Your brand visuals look the same across all platforms and devices.
• Your brand tone and voice sound the same across all written communications.

Once you create both of these, share them with both your content writers and your freelance or in-house designers. Your content marketing publications will be much more cohesive and consistent, which will keep readers coming back to you as a resource and make you look more polished and professional.

4. Is timely and engaging.

Do your customers typically plan their financials at the start of the year? If you’re a finance startup, you might publish a blog post in January about budgeting quarter-over-quarter to prevent clerical errors and avoid overspending.

At the end of the post, you might include a prompt to check out your software, or lead users to a template they can download after providing their email.

This is one example of content marketing that is timely and engaging. If you know your customer’s behavioral and spending patterns throughout the year, it’s critical to capitalize on that. Publish blog posts and offers that capture them at the right time and answer their immediate needs. You’ll be ahead of the companies that publish similar content later on — and oftentimes, being first is all you need to win a customer over.

Now that we’ve seen the top traits of effective content marketing, let’s dive into the best resources you can use to learn more about it.

There are hundreds of thousands of tools available today that qualify as excellent content marketing resources. For the sake of this article, we’re going to keep things simple by providing a handful of our favorite options today.

1. HubSpot Academy for free education on how to become an effective content marketer.
2. HubSpot’s Free Content Creation Resources for access to resources that will propel your content marketing strategy toward success.
3. Content Marketing Institute for access to some of the best content marketing online education, print, and events available today.
4. Blog articles on content marketing, trends, strategies, and tips by industry experts (like HubSpot).
5. Podcasts about content marketing, such as This Old Marketing, or business trends, such as HBR IdeaCast, to inspire your content marketing strategy.
6. Google Trends, which allows you to search for trends across broad topics like content marketing or for niche topics within content marketing.
7. Ebooks and case studies about content marketing or content marketing strategies, like this one by Mention.
8. Latest content marketing statistics by a reputable database source like Statista.
9. Easy to use visual content and design software, such as Canva.
10. Free or paid social media management tools, such as HubSpot, Buffer, or Sprout Social, to help you create and share your social content.
11. Free or paid content and project management tools, like Trello or Asana, to plan and organize your content marketing strategy.
12. Free or paid marketing software to connect your content marketing team, plan, strategy, and results to your greater marketing plan (and even your CRM).
13. Free or paid email marketing software, like HubSpot or Mailchimp, to handle all aspects of your email campaigns and content.
14. Your network, on platforms like Twitter or LinkedIn, where you can connect with those in your industry to discuss relevant trends, answer each other’s questions, and provide or ask for feedback.

And speaking of tapping into your networks on sites like Twitter and LinkedIn, here’s some inspiration from a few of the greatest content marketers to follow on both platforms today.

3 Marketers to Follow on LinkedIn

1. Luvvie Ajayi Jones

Luvvie Ajayi Jones is a best-selling author, digital strategist, podcast host, and speaker. She’s known for combining humor with her experiences and background in marketing, communications, and new media. Her LinkedIn is sure to inspire you whether you’re thinking about/working on culture, authenticity, leadership, content, marketing strategy, and more.

2. Zontee Hou

Zontee Hou is a digital marketer and strategist, speaker, and consultant. She works with scaling companies to help them establish effective marketing strategies that work for their unique goals and audiences. On her LinkedIn profile, Hou shares her expertise in content marketing, social media marketing, marketing analytics, and digital marketing.

3. A. Lee Judge

A. Lee Judge is a co-founder and digital marketing strategist at Content Monsta. He’s also a podcast and video producer, speaker, and rev ops practitioner. On his LinkedIn profile, he covers a wide range of topics related to lead generation, social media marketing, how to apply marketing analytics and data, digital experiences, multi-channel marketing, the importance of sales and marketing alignment, and more.

3 Marketers to Follow on Twitter

4. Ann Handley

Ann Handley, Head of Content at MarketingProfs, is a bestselling author and speaker. She offers education and training around marketing that businesses can learn from and apply. She offers in-person and virtual training for companies on content marketing, storytelling, lead generation, and branding – topics she also discusses and shares content about on her Twitter page.

5. Neil Patel

Neil Patel is a bestselling author, marketing expert, speaker, and website and SEO consultant. He’s a thought leader and industry expert in content and digital marketing. His Twitter page includes information about his trainings and services, industry trends, marketing strategy tips and resources, and questions/conversational topics meant to engage followers and other industry experts.

6. Guy Kawasaki

Guy Kawasaki is a marketing strategist, author, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, podcast host, and the chief evangelist of Canva. On his Twitter account, Kawasaki asks followers thought-provoking business questions as well as provides links to, and information about, new podcast episodes, industry trends, marketing strategy tips, and insights based on his experiences.

Engage Your Target Audience With Content Marketing

With effective content marketing, you can reach your target audience and increase conversions. There are several ways to market with content to boost revenue, grow your brand awareness and recognition, and build relationships with your prospects and customers.

And don’t forget to extract more value from every piece of content you create.

To get started, decide which type of content works best for your business and audience and develop a content marketing strategy to begin boosting your bottom line today.

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

The world has made small but mighty strides towards inclusivity, and language plays a big part in that.

We’ve become rightfully aware of the importance of not labeling people, as everyone has the right to self-identify as they please and use validating pronouns.

Whether you want to brush up on your knowledge or are new to adopting them, this piece is your guide to gender neutral pronouns and how to use them.

Table of Contents

• Gender Neutral Pronouns List
• Gender Neutral Pronouns
• How to Use Gender Neutral Pronouns
• Gender Neutral Pronouns Considerations

The list above are common gender-neutral pronouns.

While she and he are considered gendered, some nonbinary people use them because they don’t feel attached to the gender typically associated with them.

Someone will typically share their own pronouns but, when it doubt, you can simply refer to someone by their name. 

How to Use Gender Neutral Pronouns

In English, “He” is often used as an automatic fill-in for generic individuals.

“He” and “she” are also two extreme binaries that don’t leave room for other gender identities, which can be hurtful for transgender, nonbinary, and gender queer communities.

Ultimately, you probably don’t want to make incorrect or hurtful assumptions about someone’s gender — they could be agender, nonbinary, or uncomfortable identifying with “he” or “she.”

Gender-neutral language ensures your sentences are inclusive of everyone. But, when in doubt, refer to someone by their name rather than “him” or “her.”

“They” is one of the more common gender-neutral pronouns, and it’s easy to incorporate into your daily conversations. Here are some examples of how to use it:

• “I spoke to the marketing director and they said they’d get back to me.”
• “I think someone left their laptop behind.”
• “Who’s in charge of that campaign? I’ll email them.”

Let’s go over some examples of how you’d use other pronouns in conversation.

Ze/hir/hirs

• “Where did ze go?”
• “This pencil belongs to hir.”
• “Ze would rather do it hirself.”

Xe/xem/Xirs

• “I think xe is nice.”
• “Tell xem I say hello.”
• “That sandwich is xirs.”

Ver/vir/Vis

• “I think ver is nice.”
• “I borrowed vis pencil.”
• “I went to the store with vir.”

Te/tem/ter

• “Te went to the store.”
• “I borrowed it from tem.”
• “That’s ter dog.”

Ey/em/eir

• “Ey wrote me a note.”
• “That belongs to em.”
• “I asked to borrow eir pencil.”

Gender Neutral Pronoun Considerations

1. How to Learn Someone’s Pronouns

Upon first meeting someone, most people agree it’s best not to outright ask for pronouns because someone may feel like you’re assuming their gender identity. In some cases, it may put someone in a situation where they have to out themselves but don’t want to or aren’t ready to.

Instead, introduce yourself with your pronouns: “Hi, I’m Caroline, and my pronouns are she/her.” With this, you’re allowing the other person to share theirs, but not forcing them to.

If you do ask, there are ways to do so respectfully. For example, in a work meeting, you could say, “Before we start, I’d like to go around and share our names and pronouns if you’re comfortable sharing.” Then, people have the option to share or not to share.

During a one-on-one conversation, you could introduce yourself and share your pronouns first or say, “What are your pronouns?” or “Can you remind me of your pronouns?”

You could also include your pronouns in an email signature, social media profiles, or professional pages.

If you don’t ask for pronouns, it’s best to default to addressing someone by name. While many people consider they/them to be a gender-neutral option, some people may feel misgendered by it.

Featured Read: Why We Ask Each Other Our Pronouns

2. Aim to shy away from saying “preferred pronouns.”

Despite the popularity of the term “preferred pronouns,” it can be alienating as it can imply someone’s gender is a preference.

As mentioned, you don’t always want to ask someone about their pronouns and can instead share yours first. But, if you are asking, you can say any of the following instead of “preferred pronouns”:

• “What are your pronouns?”
• How would you like me to refer to you?
• How would you like to be addressed?

Featured Read: Gender Census 2023 Worldwide Report

3. What if someone uses multiple pronouns?

People might use multiple pronouns, like she/they or they/hirs. If someone shares that with you, they might also say they’re more comfortable with one over the other, or they’d like you to vary the pronouns you use in conversation.

That may seem challenging, but you’ve likely already done it before. For example, “He was late to work yesterday, so she had to lead the meeting.”

An example of how this would look in a conversation with someone using multiple pronouns is, “She went to the doctor because their cough hadn’t gone away for a few days.”

Featured Read: How To Affirm the People in Your Life Who Use Multiple Sets of Pronouns

4. How do you use gender neutral pronouns with titles and honorifics?

An honorific or title describes someone’s position in life or professional settings. Mrs., Mr., and Sir are examples of common honorifics, and there are gender neutral variations of them that someone might use:

• Mx. (the most common gender neutral honorific)
• Pr. (derived from person)
• Msr. (a mix of miss and sir)
• Misc. (miscellaneous)

Not everyone chooses a gender neutral honorific, so it’s best to follow their lead. If they share one, use it; if they don’t, you can avoid using one entirely.

Featured Read: Gender Neutral Titles and Why They Matter

5. Should I correct other people who make a mistake?

Some people won’t want to call attention to someone making a mistake, but others will appreciate you correcting people for them. If you have more of a relationship with the person who is misgendered, you can ask them directly what they’d like you to do, or you can say something like: “[Persons name] uses [pronoun],” and then continue the conversation.

If you don’t know someone’s preference and still want to support them, you can make sure you use the right pronouns if you talk about them. For example, if someone says, “He made an excellent point,” you could say, “I agree ze did make a good point.”

Featured Read: Misgendering Guide

6. You don’t have to ask everyone for their pronouns.

There are some cases where there is no need to ask for pronouns at all. For example, a brief encounter with a server at a restaurant doesn’t necessarily require knowing their pronouns, which is why defaulting to calling someone by their name is considered a best practice.

Featured Read: This Is Why Singular ‘They’ Is Such a Controversial Subject

7. Be open to continuous learning.

Everyone makes mistakes, and this holds true for pronouns. If you slip up, the best thing to do is acknowledge it immediately, say, “Sorry, I meant to say [pronoun],” and move on. If you realize after the fact, you can do the same thing but still keep it brief and move on.

On the other hand, making a mistake and then continuing to bring it up or say that it’s hard to remember can make someone feel awkward and like they’re a burden for having pronouns you’re not familiar with.

Be okay with making a mistake and committing to learning from it.

Featured Resource: Practice with Pronouns

It’s shaping up to be a big month at the box office as the highly anticipated films Barbie and Oppenheimer gear up for release on July 21.

When the initial Barbie trailer dropped this spring, we covered why the film’s online selfie generator was a nod to nostalgia marketing.

As we get closer to the release date, the film’s marketing engine has gone into overdrive leaning heavily into partnerships and experiential marketing. Here are just a few (yes, a few) of the tactics deployed by the Barbie marketing team:

• A “DreamHouse” in Malibu hosted by Ken on Airbnb
• A giveaway for a Barbie-themed XBOX console complete with controllers and a Dreamhouse
• Barbie’s Dream Car added to the Forza Horizon 5 game
• A Barbie x ALDO shoe and accessories collection
• A Barbie-themed ad for Progressive car insurance
• A rug collection with Ruggable
• A Barbie-inspired frozen yogurt flavor at Pinkberry
• A “Dreamhouse” scented Homesick candle
• Branded beauty collabs with OPI nail polish and NYX Cosmetics
• A “World of Barbie” activation in Los Angeles
• A Barbie boat cruise in Boston
• Barbie-pink luggage collection by BEIS Travel

The co-branded collaborations have been so extensive they’ve inspired some funny memes on Twitter.  

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Mattel, the company behind the film and iconic doll has good reason to invest so heavily in the film’s success.

The live-action film is the first major content release backed by Mattel, and its success at the box office could provide a boost to Mattel’s stock and bottom line. It’s a crucial time for the company that is looking to overcome last year’s profit slump that was driven by inflation.

Meanwhile, the marketing team behind the biopic Oppenheimer has taken a more low-key approach to marketing the film.

Oppenheimer’s marketing efforts began in 2022 with a teaser trailer and an online countdown that leads to July 16 — the 78th anniversary of the first nuclear explosion. The film’s official trailer dropped in May 2023 and has since been shared on social media by the film’s cast.

It’s worth noting that many users on Twitter are alluding to seeing both films on the same day (which is quite the vibe shift).

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We’ll see how audiences turn out later this month when the films go head-to-head at the box office.

Do you want to know why some companies are up to 59% more likely to get their customers engaged? I will give you a hint: it’s not about the price.

It’s about the ability to understand customer intent and then offer relevant and highly personalized content. 

In this article, I’ll explain what customer intent is, and how to identify it and improve your marketing efforts.

What is Customer Intent?

Customer intent, also known as buyer-level intent, is what drives a customer or lead towards a specific call-to-action, like making a purchase or signing up for your email list.

It’s an important marketing concept since it provides insight into what a prospect or customer is likely to do next, based on their behavior patterns, underlying motivations, search queries, or expressed interests. When you understand the intent behind a specific action, you can then tailor your content and communications to meet prospects and customers where they are.

Let’s imagine a hypothetical situation. You are a first-time parent with a formula-fed baby. Since you enjoy hiking, you would love to take your baby out in the wild, but you’re unsure how to have a ready-to-go formula while you’re out.

You open your laptop and type “how to make formulas while traveling,” and, voila, you already have dozens of articles advising you on how to prepare it on the go.

You dig deeper, and you discover there is something called a bottle warmer, a simple device you can use to keep your newborn fed, while you’re doing what you love.

So, what is the customer’s intent to buy?

People usually confuse customer preferences with customer intent. However, these two things aren’t the same. Customer preferences include the preferred variables of a certain shopper, and while they influence purchasing habits, customers can still make unpredictable decisions.

But, why is customer intent so important?

To put it simply: customer intent is important because it allows businesses to cater their sales and marketing strategy to meet prospects and customers where they are currently. This typically means shorter sales cycles and more closed-won deals.  

Going back to the baby example, Google found that around 40% of baby product purchases are made by households without children. If we assume that people with children are the only ones who’re buying such items, we’re missing out on a huge percentage of potential customers.

Based on this example we see how demographics and intent don’t go hand in hand always. So, it is a good idea to not rule out potential customers simply because they don’t fit previous buyer personas. 

What are the stages of customer intent?

Here are the six stages of customer intent. 

Awareness

The first stage of customer intent is awareness, and we define it as the moment when customers first hear about your brand.  

For instance, let’s imagine we have an operations manager at a manufacturing company, who recently opened up its 5th warehouse. And it is the first one in this particular state. They stumble upon a piece of content from a brand documenting the most common plumbing quality issues for large businesses in this state. 

Interest

In this stage, customers become aware of a potential problem. Then, they are either educating themselves or learning more about these issues. 

To continue with the previous example, this person just discovered there’s an issue with hard water at the new warehouse. Besides the mineral buildup on plumbing fixtures’ that downgrades their lifespan and look, hard water can be considered a potential health hazard. So, they are now reading different articles on hard water, the problems it creates, and how to solve it.

Consideration

The third phase in a customer intent journey is consideration. In this stage, customers know about different solutions for the problem and consider which one to go with.

Going back to our hard water problem, this prospect realizes this might be an issue in more than one of their warehouses and is starting to look for software and services to solve this issue.  

Intent

In this stage, the person is fully aware of the problem and is searching for solutions to fix it.  

Going back to the hard water problem, they are now actively evaluating a handful of plumbing quality software that specializes in working with large-scale suppliers.  

Evaluation

During this stage, the person is evaluating different potential solutions. They may be comparing features, pricing, etc.  

For instance, going back to the hard water problem, they might turn to comparison guides, check out reviews, and seek out customers for references. 

Purchase

Once an individual has reached this point, the person is ready to buy their product or service 

It’s important to mention this is not the last stage in the customer intent journey. Brands still need to focus on customer experience and customer retention, if they want to drive word-of-mouth referrals and/or repeat sales.

How do you identify customer intent?

Now, that we know the stages of the customer intent journey, here’s how marketers can start to identify customer intent. 

Leverage first-party data 

When we’re talking about first-party data, we’re referring to info that users knowingly give us. 

A direct example would be if requested a piece of content from NetLine. To access the asset, you’d fill out a form with your name, title, email, industry, and a good deal more. That’s a conscious action you’re taking to share some details about yourself.

As we move to a cookieless world, first-party data becomes even more valuable. This applies to both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) data. At NetLine, when we collect first-party data, we’re not just interested in who the person is. We’re digging deeper to understand the person’s role at work, including their job area and level. This can also include info about the company, the industry they in, and more. . 

Use social listening tools

By monitoring conversations, keywords, and hashtags, social listening tools can help marketers determine which platforms their ideal customers use the most, what their likes and dislikes are, and uncover their pain points.

Furthermore, these tools can help marketers capture demand by allowing them to be in front of prospects and customers at the right time to respond to questions related to their product or service. 

For instance, these tools can help marketers discover when a competitor just raised prices. They can then respond to the customers complaining and sell them on why their solution is better. 

Do keyword research

Conducting keyword research, using tools like Ahrefs or Semrush, allow marketers to get better insights into customer intent, as you can learn what problems your ideal customers are trying to solve, how they are going about currently solving it, and the type of solutions they are looking for.

For marketers who are conducting keyword research for the first time, we recommend starting with bottom-of-funnel keywords (BOFU) first. These are the keywords or phrases that indicate your ideal customer is already problem and solution aware, and likely will be the easiest to close. 

For instance, an ERP software might go after a BOFU keyword like “NetSuite vs. SAP Business One, since it indicates that the person is likely looking for a new ERP and is actively checking out two of the market leaders.  

Conduct customer interviews

Whether you are conducting your own customer interviews or using a framework, like Jobs-To-Be-Done, the goal of these interviews is to understand the underlying motivations, goals, and pain points that your ideal customers have.

When you understand what they are trying to achieve and the “job” that they are using your product or service for, you can leverage that in the messaging you create.

For instance, if the problem is neck pain from sitting at a desk all day, companies should think about all the ways their product can solve this problem and advertise based on these features.

Use AI-powered tools

The exponential growth of AI tools, like ChatGPT, paved the way for a better understanding of consumer needs. These powerful tools can summarize a transcript, analyze sentiment, and help you pinpoint specific motivations or pain points faster.

For instance, you can feed the transcript of your latest customer interview into ChatGPT. Then, ask it to analyze the sentiment and summarize the key takeaways. Repeat that many more times and you can have a rudimentary buyer persona that can inform your overall content strategy.

How to use customer intent to grow your business

By understanding customer behavior and user intent, you can create and map out different customer journeys for all of your ideal customer personas. So, you can deliver an exceptional user experience from the moment they first hear about your brand.

Create content that meets prospects where they are at

Understanding customer intent goes hand-in-hand with understanding their motivations and pain points that have driven them to your company in the first place. Then, your content marketing strategy should reflect that by serving up the right content at the right times. 

Surface compelling offers at the right times 

Data shows that, on average, brands see a 20% increase in sales when using personalized offers, and 80% of customers are more likely to buy from a company that offers personalized experiences.

One way to surface more compelling offers is through retargeting.

In fact, retargeted customers are 70% more likely to purchase the product and that CTR is 10x higher on them, we understand how important it is to understand customer intent in advertising.

Once businesses detect leads with these intent indicators, they should serve retargeting ads or emails based on what they last looked at on your site. 

Display social proof

Businesses can use customer reviews, testimonials, and case studies to show how their product or service solves a specific pain point that their ideal customers have. 

Why is customer intention important?

Understanding customer intention is crucial for making the most of your sales and marketing campaigns, including: 

• Allows for greater personalization.
• Drives down customer acquisition costs.  
• Makes your marketing efforts more profitable and efficient. 
• Improve open, click-through, and email conversion rates 

Top tips for understanding and researching consumer intent

Whether it is from first-party or third-party data, here are some tips to gain a deeper understanding of customer intent within their target accounts, allowing them to personalize their outreach, create tailored content, and drive successful ABM campaign

• Create buyer personas – Building customer personas that accurately depict your target accounts, including their objectives, challenges, pain points, and factors that influence their decision-making can help you tailor your messaging to close more deals.
• Leverage intent data platforms – Using an intent-driven data platform identifies signals of intent from your target accounts, such as content consumption and search activity. NetLine’s INTENTIVE, for example, delivers real-time insights into “who” is actively expressing intent in an account, “what” actions that person is taking, “when” those actions took place, and uniquely “where” those actions occurred.
• Analyze website analytics – Study your website data to gain insights into prospects and customers’ browsing and engagement patterns.
• Engage in social listening – Keep a close eye on the social media activities of your target accounts, looking for mentions, discussions, and relevant hashtags that indicate consumer intent.
• Collaborate regularly with sales – When sales and marketing are working together, it will make it easier to gather insights and close more deals.
• Leverage predictive analytics – Utilize predictive analytics to identify patterns and trends within your target accounts’ behavior, enabling you to anticipate their needs and align your strategies accordingly.
• Continuously refine and iterate – Regularly analyze and refine your understanding of customer intent based on data and feedback, adjusting your ABM strategies to better align with their evolving needs.
  

Bottom line

Understanding customer intent provides marketers with valuable insights into their target customers’ desires, requirements, and challenges, enabling them to develop effective solutions that meet their customers’ needs. Additionally, getting better at understanding customer intent enables companies to better prioritize their deal flow and concentrate on the strategic accounts that are most likely to close.

As the second-largest search engine, with over 2 billion users per month, YouTube is an undeniably important channel for your marketing efforts. Knowing how to optimize your YouTube channel can help you increase your chances of discoverability and reach more people.

One of the most important tactics for optimizing your YouTube channel is to create engaging YouTube descriptions. Here, we’ll discuss how to create compelling descriptions for your YouTube channel and videos.

YouTube Channel Descriptions

A YouTube channel description is similar to the About Page of a website. It appears under the “About” tab of your channel’s YouTube page.

The YouTube channel description conveys to potential viewers what your content will cover, including the issues you tackle and the communities you serve. You’ll be able to add this when setting up your YouTube channel.

As a YouTube creator, your primary goal is to attract viewers and turn them into subscribers, often using your channel description. With that in mind, be sure to use keywords that your intended audience would use to search for your content.

YouTube Video Descriptions

Every YouTube video includes a description that can be found under the viewport of the video.

Additionally, every video needs a unique description to increase the likelihood of your video being found when someone is searching for a particular topic.

A YouTube content creator’s video description attracts and converts an audience. Therefore, it’s crucial that you optimize your video descriptions for SEO.

If you’re unsure how to start crafting compelling YouTube descriptions, keep reading. We’ll explore various tactics you can employ and provide templates to ensure you have everything you need to excel on YouTube.

1. Use YouTube description templates. [Free Prompts]

HubSpot compiled seven YouTube video description templates to help your business provide context to your viewers, rank better in search, organize your team, and link to relevant web pages on your site.

Download These Templates for Free

2. Explain your content.

To explore the best tactics for writing YouTube descriptions, I spoke with Eric Peters, a Senior Growth Product Manager on HubSpot’s Academy team. He said, “[YouTube descriptions] are one of the primary ways YouTube knows what your video is about. Include links, additional resources, links to other videos and playlists, etc. Make sure the description box is easy to read.”

Peters explained that your YouTube video description and closed captioning should incorporate keywords into your description. It also helps with accessibility for people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing. Hence, adding closed captioning to your videos is an absolute must for accessibility.

For instance, take a look at one of HubSpot Marketing’s YouTube video descriptions:

A YouTube description differs from a web page meta description. In a YouTube description, content creators explain what your entire video is about and even link to external resources.

Peters told me, “You get 5,000 characters total, so make use of it. YouTube creators use asterisks or all-caps to differentiate titles from body copy because it’s all plain text. Consider writing up a text version of the key points from the video, or even copying the transcription of the video and paste it into the description.”

3. Include a call-to-action (CTA).

Your YouTube description is a fantastic opportunity to ask viewers to continue to engage with your channel or find additional resources that will help them learn more about a topic of interest.

For instance, let’s say you create a brief “How to Add Filters to Instagram” YouTube video, but you also have an in-depth “How to Use Instagram for Marketing” blog post. Why not link it in the description? Most likely, anyone watching your Instagram video on YouTube would be equally grateful for the opportunity to learn more through a blog post.

Perhaps you simply want to ask viewers to subscribe, turn on notifications, or share your content with their networks. These are all acceptable CTA’s for your description.

You must format your description to ensure you put the most important information first. Peters advises, “The first 200 characters are above the ‘more’ fold on the description box, so if you want your CTA/link to be seen by most people, keep it within the first 200 characters.”

After the first 200 characters, your text will be cut off, and viewers will need to click “Show more” to see the rest. Therefore, you must make your first 200 characters count.

4. Add your personality.

A YouTube description should be fun and demonstrate your brand’s personality with a unique voice. Unlike traditional forms of advertising, this is an opportunity for you to instill creativity and humor into your content.

Brian Dean’s YouTube channel is a great example of this. His YouTube descriptions often mirror the way he speaks. The descriptions are candid and casual, and he makes it feel like he’s writing to a friend.

To learn more about using YouTube for marketing purposes, consider checking out HubSpot Academy’s comprehensive YouTube Marketing course.

5. Use timestamps to make videos scannable.

Including timestamps in your video description can make your video more user-friendly and help your content rank well on search engines.

YouTube video timestamps appear within search results, improving user retention by directing users to the most relevant portions of videos from SERPs.

Users can search for keywords that appear in your video’s description and click on a thumbnail on the SERP to view the portion of your video that answers their search query.

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YouTube Channel Description Examples

Every YouTube channel description should allude to a specific niche or central theme. You want to tell your audience what they will learn from your channel. This will give them a reason to tune in to your channel, subscribe to it, and continue learning from you and your videos. Additionally, when you add your niche to your YouTube description, your audience can more easily find you in a sea of potentially similar creators.

1. Wes McDowell

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Wes McDowell‘s YouTube channel targets viewers in the digital marketing niche. The channel description mentions the channel’s mission: teaching small businesses owners digital marketing strategies they can use to grow their businesses. The description also lists topics the channel will feature in its videos, invites viewers to subscribe, and describes the benefits of subscribing to the channel.

Why We Love It

This YouTube channel description is clear and direct. It details what viewers will get when they come to the channel. This description also describes the marketing strategies and techniques viewers will learn. Clarity goes a long way to make a channel easily searchable and rankable on YouTube.

2. Yoga With Adriene

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Yoga With Adriene‘s YouTube channel description highlights one of the channel’s main values: inclusion. The channel description mentions that everyone is invited to participate and learn more about yoga through her videos, regardless of their skill level. The description also recommends videos that beginners can watch to become familiar with the content.

Why We Love It

This channel description is an excellent example of how a company’s mission can be useful for video content. The description gives subscribers a glimpse into Yoga with Adriene’s values, creating a connection with the viewer. This angle is helpful for ranking on YouTube because it’s aligned with morals and values that subscribers can easily identify with.

3. Wild Wonderful Off-Grid

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Wild Wonderful Off-Grid‘s YouTube channel description positions the channel within a niche by using the keywords “off-grid,” “self-reliant,” and “building our own home” to appeal to viewers who are interested in living off-the-grid. The description also invites viewers to visit their online store and social media profiles.

Why We Love It

This YouTube channel description establishes a niche, describes the channel’s content, provides background information about the creators, and encourages subscribers and viewers to participate further in their brand. The description also directs their audience to other aspects of their business, such as their store and social media platforms, which fosters value for their subscribers.

4. The Pals

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The Pals‘ YouTube channel description introduces the channel’s creators, lists the video games the channel will highlight, and provides each creator’s personal YouTube channel and Roblox username.

Why We Love It

This YouTube channel description focuses on the entertainment the channel provides. The description targets subscribers looking for gaming knowledge and mentions the creators’ personal journeys to set the channel apart from others in the same niche and genre.

5. Florian Gadsby

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Florian Gadsby‘s YouTube channel description introduces the channel’s creator and lists the topics that viewers can expect to see when they subscribe. It also links to the creator’s social media and newsletter, and provides information about the creator’s online store, including its restocking schedule.

Why We Love It

This YouTube channel description takes a personal approach to the channel’s subject matter. The description gives visitors clarity about the channel’s content and artistic focus. It also encourages viewers to interact with the creator on their social media platforms to learn more about them and view more of their content.

6. SciShow

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SciShow‘s YouTube channel description introduces the channel’s creators and hints at the topics that viewers can expect to see every week. The description also outlines the channel’s posting schedule and mentions other YouTube channels associated with the brand.

Why We Love It

This YouTube channel description tells its viewers when they will see uploads. This is a good strategy to ensure users visit the channel right at the time when they’re expecting to see new content. If views go up on a page, the YouTube algorithm is more likely to boost your channel to a wider audience.

7. Unbox Therapy

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Unbox Therapy‘s YouTube channel description states the channel’s tagline, gives an overview of the channel’s content, and provides a contact email for business inquiries.

Why We Love It

This simple channel description piques viewers’ interest with a captivating tagline and a straightforward explanation of the channel’s content. It also includes an email that allows viewers to contact the creators to inquire about the business and ask professional questions about the channel.

YouTube Channel Description Templates

Now that we’ve covered the basics, take a look at a few templates you can use to craft a compelling YouTube description.

1. Playful YouTube Channel Description Template

You might create a playful, easy-going channel ‘About Me’ description, like this one:

Hi, I’m [Name]. This is my channel about increasing your sales, effectively targeting your audience, and growing an email list that you can use to grow your business.

If you’re a marketer who wants to learn marketing strategies to get [result, i.e., more traffic to your site], subscribe to my channel.

My channel publishes videos that focus on storytelling content that connects X, shows you how to infuse your authenticity in your brand, and gives you a marketing strategy that feels organic. If that sounds like it could be helpful for you, please join me!

2. Third-Person YouTube Channel Description Template

Alternatively, you can craft a YouTube description that describes what your company does from a third-person point of view, like this one:

[Company] is the worldwide leader in X, Y, and Z. Since [year], [Company] has been on a mission to [insert company vision or purpose here].

To learn more about [Company], its values, and its [company offering], subscribe to our channel to stay informed.

3. Niche YouTube Channel Description Template

Let your subscribers know what you’re all about and describe your niche when writing your YouTube channel description.

[Name] and [Name] have nuanced discussions about dating, their lifestyle, and relationships. They discuss current topics that affect modern dating and how to maneuver relationship patterns. You can purchase [Name] and [Name]’s [product] to learn more about improving your knowledge of relationships.

4. Inviting YouTube Channel Description Template

Building a relationship with your followers is one of the most important things you can do as a content creator. Use this template to invite them to join you on your journey as you grow your brand.

This channel gives everything you need to know about gaming, including the latest equipment reviews, new game reviews, and once-a-week live streams. Watch as I, [name], try to beat my high score in the latest release of [insert game name here].

5. Personal YouTube Channel Description Template

Don’t be afraid to be vulnerable with your audience. Adding personal touches in your YouTube channel description, like the template below, can help you come across as more authentic.

This is a personal journey of how I became a painter. Learn about what paints I purchase, the tools I use, and the techniques I learned during school. Art is my passion, and I express my love for [insert passion] through it.

6. Straight-Forward YouTube Channel Description Template

Tell your audience exactly what they can expect from your channel by using this template:

This channel gives pop culture commentary through a [political ideology] political lens. We make commentary on books and current events. We also upload a new video every Wednesday and Friday.

YouTube Video Description Examples

A helpful video description can spike your audience’s interest and result in longer watch times, better view counts, and even new subscribers. Plus, it can help with YouTube SEO, allowing YouTube’s algorithm to understand your content and suggest it to new users, further boosting your YouTube metrics.

1. “5 Best Coding Languages for Beginners 2021” by nicole . young

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The description of nicole . young’s YouTube video, “5 Best Coding Languages for Beginners 2021,” hooks the viewer by posing a question that will be answered in the video. The video description also includes a benefit that the viewer will gain from watching the video.

Why We Love It

In this video description, the creator summarizes the video’s title and specifies the target audience. The text will help audiences (and YouTube) understand the video’s content. This creator understands that the channel description is prime real estate for contact information, social media handles, and calls to action, persuading viewers to stick around.

“How to Write Counterpoint – Music Composition” by Music Matters

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The description of Music Matters’s YouTube video, “How to Write Counterpoint – Music Composition,” uses keywords such as “writing counterpoint,” “music composition lesson,” and “understanding counterpoint” to appeal to audiences that are interested in learning the music composition technique. The description also includes timestamps that viewers can use to skip to the portion of the video that addresses the specific topic they want to learn about.

Why We Love It

This YouTube video description uses keywords to appeal to a niche audience. The specificity makes it easily searchable on YouTube. Using keywords to make each video search-friendly will drive traffic to your video’s specific content.

“How to Create a 90 Day Plan for your Business (+ Free Workbook)” by Anna Clark

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The description of Anna Clark’s YouTube video, “How to Create a 90 Day Plan for your Business (+ Free Workbook),” includes links to the creator’s website, courses, newsletter, and social media accounts, and a workbook that viewers can download and complete as they watch the video.

Why We Love It

It’s good to involve your viewers in other aspects of your business. The interaction and engagement you earn will help you rank against other active channels. Directing your viewers to other resources for your business will also help your YouTube channel drive traffic to your website, increasing your authority in your business niche.

“How To Create An Email Sales Funnel” by Wishpond

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The description of Wishpond’s YouTube video, “How To Create An Email Sales Funnel,” hooks the viewer by stating that the video is the fourth installment in a series and linking to the previous video. The video description also includes an incentive for viewers to learn more about the company.

Why We Love It

This description segments the video as a section of a larger series. If subscribers learn that you provide similar content on your channel, they will be more inclined to watch your other videos. The description also lets viewers know there’s a free demo of the service. If you sell other products or services in your business, be sure to link them in the description.

“How to Outline Your Novel – Part 2” by Writing with Jenna Moreci

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The description of Writing with Jenna Moreci’s YouTube video, “How to Outline Your Novel – Part 2,” hooks the viewer by stating that the video is the second installment in a series and linking to the previous video. The video description also includes an incentive for viewers to learn more about the creator’s products.

Why We Love It

This video description is great because it lets viewers know what’s coming next. Inserting a “new segment” in your YouTube series allows viewers to anticipate your next video.

“Microgreens Growing: Materials and Beginner’s Guide” by Epic Gardening

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The description of Epic Gardening’s YouTube video, “Microgreens Growing: Materials and Beginner’s Guide,” invites novice gardeners to learn about growing microgreens. The video description tells viewers about the creator’s past experience with microgreens, lists the supplies that the creator mentions in the video, and lists ways that viewers can support the creator beyond watching their video.

Why We Love It

The creator provides a list of products used in the video. The viewers can conduct further research into the products or purchase them immediately through the links.

“Budgeting for Beginners – How to Make a Budget From Scratch 2021” by Debt Free Millennials

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Debt Free Millennials’ YouTube video, “Budgeting for Beginners – How to Make a Budget From Scratch 2021,” teaches viewers to create a budget. The description gives viewers an overview of the topics covered in the video and invites them to sign up for products and services through affiliated links. It also includes links to the creator’s Instagram, Facebook group, and website so that viewers can connect with the creator through different social platforms.

Why We Love It

The creator has created a sense of community and togetherness. If you include your social media links in your YouTube video description, subscribers will follow you on multiple platforms to remain engaged with your content. The content creator invites them to return for new videos and share their own experiences on social media.

YouTube Video Description Templates

A YouTube video description is descriptive text that includes but is not limited to keywords, themes, and special concepts/guests that the content creator wants their viewers to know. The YouTube video description increases visibility through SEO, views, and subscriptions. In each video description, the content creator will encourage their viewers to “Like,” “Share,” and “Subscribe” to their content. An effective video description will be persuasive and informative, and prompt the audience to tune in regularly.

1. Simple YouTube Video Description Template

Rather than writing a lengthy summary of your video, keep your video descriptions detailed enough to let the viewer know what to expect, yet concise enough so they don’t lose interest.

Listen to how our CEO explains the difference between X and Y, and learn best practices for implementing your own strategy.

Learn more about X and Y in our course: [course link].

2. Social Media YouTube Video Description Template

You can use a YouTube channel description like this one to help new viewers connect with you on your other channels and social media platforms:

Hi there! New to [name of channel]? If so, here’s what you need to know: I like [interests related to channel] a LOT, so I use this channel to explore X, Y, and Z, to help you [desired result for viewer].

Where else you can find me:

INSTAGRAM: http://instagram.com/[accountname]

TWITTER: http://twitter.com/[accountname]

LIFESTYLE CHANNEL: http://www.youtube.com/[accountname]

Join our growing community for new videos every Tuesday and Friday!

BUSINESS INQUIRIES

Please contact [PR representative] at [email or phone number].

3. Search-Friendly YouTube Video Description Template

YouTube increases visibility within keyword searches and relevant content. As a result, videos should have buzzwords in video and channel descriptions.

If you want to craft a description that explains what your video is about and incorporates a keyword description, try this:

Hey there! This lesson is part of a free online course. Take the full course here: www.company.com/course1.

Some people are unsure what X is — at its most basic, X is [brief definition of keyword]. In this video, you’ll learn how to X, Y, and Z, to ensure you’re able to grow your brand online.

In addition, we’ll explain how you can avoid doing A. Sometimes, A is all it takes to lose a customer.

4. Teaser YouTube Video Description Template.

Use your video descriptions as an opportunity to let your viewers know when to expect new content from you, like this template:

Join the “musical nerds” on a mission to improve our musical understanding. We upload every Wednesday and Thursday. We will have Q & A sessions to answer all of your beginner questions on Wednesdays, starting next week.

5. Transparent YouTube Video Description Template

Transparency is key to gaining the trust of your audience. This template is a great example of how to let your viewers know when you are using affiliate links in your descriptions.

What’s up, guys? In this video, we’ll talk about an everyday makeup look you can do in 10 minutes. I’m not an early riser, but just like anyone, I still want to look good for the day. I’ll list the products I used in this video.

Please subscribe if you are feeling my vibe. I post content weekly, and you can always find me on Insta! I’ll drop my social media handles below.

**All opinions are my own. This video isn’t sponsored. I’m sent products for my consideration, and I earn a small percentage from sales through affiliated links. Clicking on affiliated links doesn’t cost you anything.**

6. Engaging YouTube Video Description Template

Engaging with your audience is essential for building community with them. Here, this description encourages viewers to leave suggestions in the comments section for the chance to be featured in future videos.

Hi, everyone! We’re the Science Kidz! Today we are experimenting to find out which popcorn brand leaves behind the least number of kernels. Will it be Orville Redenbacher’s or Act II?

Every week, we do a new experiment as part of our initiative to highlight STEM careers in Savannah, Georgia. If you have an experiment you want to see The Science Kidz try, leave a comment below. You never know — we could pick yours!

Follow me on Instagram for more experiment ideas, and tag us in some of the experiments you do with your friends!

7. Sponsored YouTube Video Description Templates

Disclosing paid sponsorships or product placements doesn’t have to be super jargon-heavy. Using a template like this one can help you be candid with your audience without straying from your brand’s voice and sounding like a robot.

Hey, y’all! Today, we’ll be rebuilding a 454 Chevy Big Block motor. We’ll be adding 200 horses to bring the motor up to 680 horsepower. I hope y’all are ready to dive into business with Motor Boyz.

This episode is sponsored by Husky tools, and we’ll be using their latest impact and driver tools to rebuild the 454. We would like to thank Anderson Auto for donating the 1972 C10 to be our frame once the motor is rebuilt and completed.

1. Use templates.

Once you have your brand voice down, create a template to use in your video descriptions to help save you time when uploading. If you’re having trouble creating a template on your own, use HubSpot’s YouTube templates to get some inspiration.

2. Be clear and concise.

When writing a description for a YouTube video, you should aim for simplicity. Make sure all the essential information is above the fold. That way, you can ensure potential viewers know what your video is about as they search for what they need.

3. Connect with subscribers.

Use your YouTube descriptions to help new viewers connect with you on your other channels and social media platforms. In doing this, you can increase your cross-promote content more easily and boost engagement and discoverability. Just make sure to put your social media links toward the end of your descriptions, since there are more important details to keep above the fold.

4. Create a niche.

Whether you’re writing a description for your channel or a video, you’ll want to define your niche. Start by introducing yourself or your brand, then highlight what you have to offer and what makes you unique. Be sure to incorporate relevant keywords that are used to search for content in your niche so your target audience has a better chance at finding you.

5. Show your journey.

You may want to create a channel description that asks viewers to join you on a journey that you document on your YouTube channel. For instance, if your YouTube channel focuses on streaming video game content, you may invite your subscribers to watch you as you attempt to win the game. Therefore, mentioning a goal for your channel can help you gain new subscribers eager to come along for the ride as you pursue a goal.

6. Be more personal.

Create a sense of community with your channel by being more personal with your audience. When writing your descriptions, consider including personal touches, such as telling a story, using relatable language, or speaking directly to the viewer. By offering an emotional appeal, you and your content will come off as more authentic, helping you create a stronger connection with your subscribers.

7. Create anticipation for new content.

A content creator needs to build excitement for the next video — a sense of urgency and anticipation for their audience. A YouTuber can create giveaways, conduct polls, and invite special guests to participate in the videos to maintain the channel’s success.

8. Make it search-friendly.

We have all done it: Having parts of an idea and hoping Google will fill in the blanks by completing the search with the rest of our thought. As a content creator, you need to own each of the video’s related tags, including misspellings, to help refine the content under your channel. The YouTube videos need to be centered around keywords, maximizing your SEO for Google and YouTube searches.

9. Lead viewers to other resources.

When crafting your descriptions, consider linking to related content that viewers might find interesting or helpful. For example, if you have a blog, you can link to a blog post that goes more in-depth on the topic you’re discussing. Not only will this help provide additional context to the viewer, but bring more traffic to your website.

10. Incorporate keywords.

Use keywords in your descriptions to increase the visibility of your YouTube channel and videos. In order to determine which keywords you should target, you’ll need to conduct keyword research. When crafting your description, don’t repeat the same keywords too much. Instead, insert them in a way that sounds natural. This will keep it easy to read and help you avoid keyword stuffing.

11. Tease a new initiative.

A new video is upcoming, and you need to send a teaser to your audience that will create buzz leading up to the release of the new content. A video teaser can be uploaded to YouTube Shorts to increase anticipation.

12. Be transparent.

Authenticity sells. Viewers know when you aren’t being transparent with them, so just be real. If you have affiliate partners, gifted products, or sponsorships, don’t try to hide it. Be honest with your viewers and write a disclaimer in your description.

As a YouTuber, it is essential to engage with your audience and build their trust. If you lose that trust, it can be hard to win it back.

13. Maintain engagement.

Keeping your audience engaged is crucial for getting them to return for more content. When writing your video description, use a strong hook that grabs your audience’s attention and makes them want to watch. Be sure to break down the video into sections and include timestamps for each one. This allows viewers to jump to specific parts of the video, so they remain interested.

14. Plug your products.

Any time you mention or use one of your products or services in a video, you should always include a link in your description. By doing this, you prompt the audience to try your product or service for themselves. Offering a discount code may also encourage potential customers to take the leap.

15. Test out different formats.

If your videos aren’t getting the reach you expect, try experimenting with different description formats and templates. Maybe your descriptions are too long and they get cut off on certain devices, or perhaps there are better keywords you can optimize for. Testing out different descriptions will help give you a better idea of what works best for your brand.

Download these YouTube description templates, and help your video go viral.

These must-have YouTube video and channel description templates can help you reduce the time it takes to upload and optimize your YouTube videos, getting them out to your audience quickly and with less effort. Be sure to customize the text to enhance the reading experience because you want to be as helpful as possible for your audience.

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