Category Archives: B2B

I’ve faced plenty of problems when building content teams. Sometimes, those problems led to outright failures. Content falls flat, email campaigns flop, or new hires don’t work out.

At times, it feels easier to just accept reality and move on. “Well, that new hire wasn’t the right person for our team right now. We’ll do better next time!” But, if you don’t understand why that hire didn’t work out — if you fail to understand the real problem — you’re bound to repeat it.

Conducting a root cause analysis (RCA) helps you confront your perceived reality and truly understand what went wrong so you don’t repeat history. Now, that can sound a little scary.

After all, while we’ve been told for years that learning from failure is key to growth, admitting to failure feels vulnerable. What if I am the problem? What if it’s something I cannot fix?

The RCA process helps us work through those fears using a data-driven approach and critical thinking. It asks us to eschew the easy answer and chase deeper truths. From there, we can build a more informed and practical approach to challenges. We fail, we learn, and we improve. That’s the goal of a good RCA.

How do you run a root cause analysis, and what tools can you use to do it effectively? Grab your free root cause analysis template, and let’s get into it.

Table of Contents

• What is root cause analysis?
• What is the “5 whys” approach for a root cause analysis?
• What tools can help you with root cause analysis?
• Start Your Root Cause Analysis With Our Free Template

Marketers experienced in project management know it’s important to monitor your systems and take an honest look at things when they break down. RCA offers a framework to better understand how organizational components work together and how it can improve.

To help us unpack RCAs, I talked with Ellen Smolko, a fractional CMO at Foresight Performance. She’s helped many companies analyze business problems with RCAs and find significant value in the process.

“Root cause analysis helps you move past surface-level symptoms and tackle the true sources of underperformance,” Smolko said.

“For example, if sales are down, it’s tempting to assume you need more leads. But often, the real problem lies deeper: perhaps your offerings no longer meet evolving customer needs, or your messaging fails to communicate value. By systematically identifying and addressing these root causes, RCA enables you to make informed decisions that lead to lasting improvements.”

What is the “5 whys” approach for a root cause analysis?

An RCA’s purpose is to identify the root cause of a problem. That means that when we’re confronted with a problem, we can’t accept our first instinct.

We need a framework to help us question the people, processes, tools, systems, and environments influencing a negative outcome.

That’s where the “5 Whys” comes into play. In the 5 Whys approach, you repeatedly ask why a problem happened to drill down past the obvious answers and find the underlying root cause. Sakichi Toyoda pioneered this technique and applied it liberally in the company he founded — Toyota Industries.

As an example, I’m going to apply the 5 Whys to my new hire example from before.

Several years ago, I was building a content team from scratch. We had an urgent need to meet client expectations with stellar written content. But, our content was falling below that expectation, and our new hires were turning over voluntarily and involuntarily within 12 months.

Why was this happening?

Why 1: Why are new content hires not meeting performance expectations and leaving so soon?

An important piece of the 5 Whys exercise is to use objective data as much as possible. We often build subjective assumptions around people and processes and let those influence decision-making:

• “The new hires just don’t get it.”
• “They’re not spending enough time understanding their customers.”
• “They’re not surfacing their own problems fast enough.”

But, does the data we gather bear out those assumptions? During this exercise, set aside what you think you know and focus on what you can prove.

Pro tip: Using data to support decisions is a key tenet of total quality management — and simply a good practice to lean on when advocating for complex organizational changes.

In this case, I looked at quality control data provided by clients and team leads, as well as satisfaction surveys from staff. From those data points, I found that several team members were unhappy with their roles. These team members were also the ones clients flagged as producing content that didn’t meet expectations.

It’s tempting to stop here; after all, doesn’t this back up our subjective assumptions? The new hires clearly don’t get their clients. But, the 5 Whys has us go deeper.

Why 2: Why are team members unhappy with their roles and not meeting client expectations?

I could sense team members were frustrated, and the data supported that feeling. And clients were certainly vocal about their frustrations as well.

So, I dug deeper into the quantitative hiring, onboarding, and performance data. I also ran more qualitative surveys, talking with current team members about their struggles and what they felt was happening.

Analysis at this stage uncovered two key learnings:

1. Unhappy team members felt overwhelmed by the number of clients and their expectations.
2. They weren’t getting enough feedback and support to adjust to those expectations and improve their performance.

Why 3: Why are team members feeling overwhelmed and lacking sufficient feedback and support?

You’ve probably noticed a trend with these questions: the previous conclusion informs the next question. That’s the secret to a good 5 Whys session — you keep interrogating.

You also might start taking things personally at this stage of the process. I felt I owned a significant piece of this problem. They were my team — were they not getting enough help from me? What was I doing wrong?

There’s a place in this process for extreme ownership and to follow through on improvements personally. But, remember that we need data to back our decisions. We have to continue objectively to ensure we really understand the root cause.

So, I talked with our talent management, and we dug deeper into the hiring and onboarding process, including screening questions, writing test analysis, and early hire management practices. The data showed us:

1. We were not thoroughly assessing content team candidates’ skills and abilities for a match to the role.
2. We lacked consistent performance reviews and mentorship to ensure feedback turned into professional development opportunities.

Why 4: Why was there a role mismatch and a lack of performance reviews and mentorship?

We reviewed hiring and onboarding data and saw how fast managers pushed to hire. We had a fair number of steps in our hiring process, but we could move through those steps quickly (and, perhaps, too quickly).

Looking at onboarding, we also found our process covered the usual administrative tasks like taking PTO or logging client hours. Yet, we hadn’t addressed the need for continuous performance management or close mentorship.

Why 5: Why were we hiring so quickly and using a limited onboarding process?

At this stage, you can see how organizational goals and challenges influenced my team. Our company was growing rapidly, and client count and expectations grew accordingly. Growth pressured the hiring managers, who wanted to just get people onto the team to meet ballooning demand.

The rush also led to a rushed onboarding process. We were so focused on getting team members that we didn’t put enough energy into keeping them. We were missing a strategic focus on long-term team development, which included deeper onboarding and more effective mentorship and performance management.

Using the 5 Whys to Improve Your Organization

From this approach, we took measures to make substantial improvements:

• Reassessing the pressure to scale quickly.
• Tinkering with hiring and onboarding processes to find best-fit people for our growth stage.
• Implementing more structure and feedback opportunities to boost performance.
• Doubling down on team development as a core component of managers’ roles and responsibilities (including my own role).

These changes helped build a stronger, more resilient team who consistently met and exceeded client expectations. It wasn’t a perfect solution — growth always surfaces new challenges. But, it got us going in a more informed direction.

Pro tip: You can run the 5 Whys with nothing more than a whiteboard and dry-erase marker, but it’s tough to think through challenges on the spot. I recommend using our 5 Whys template to break through barriers and start mulling.

It’s also vital to note that you can only perform the 5 Whys successfully if your company culture can accept failure and not resort to blame and distrust. While you should own failure and learn from it, you cannot do so in a place where you don’t feel safe.

That lack of safety leads to ignoring data that points to the “wrong” conclusion, not fully analyzing the situation, or failing to follow through on needed changes.

My experience also raises an important point of caution that Smolko echoed.

“While straightforward, the 5 Whys method has limitations,” she said. “It assumes a single root cause and relies heavily on accurate data. Many marketing challenges are multifaceted, requiring deeper exploration and validation.”

This approach helps you get started, but a true root cause analysis should push you beyond a single-cause mentality.

What tools can help you with root cause analysis?

After you’ve run your 5 Whys approach, you should have a better sense of root causes. But, like Smolko mentioned, there are more places begging for deeper review and critical thinking. RCAs can use different approaches and tools to help unpack complex challenges.

Fishbone Diagrams

You may also see these called Ishikawa diagrams or cause-and-effect diagrams, but they’re called fishbone diagrams because they look like a fish’s skeleton. These diagrams help you map potential contributing factors to your specific problem.

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Begin by placing your problem at the “head” of the fishbone. Then, identify major categories like people, processes, and tools. Under each category, brainstorm all possible causes contributing to the problem. For instance, I would put “speedy hiring and onboarding” under the processes category.

Finally, analyze how these causes relate to each other and your problem. The fishbone visual helps you organize thoughts around complex problems and spot missing connections and opportunities.

Pro tip: If you’re looking to hop right into a fishbone diagram exercise, check out our free fishbone diagram template for a head start.

Affinity Diagrams

An affinity diagram helps you organize and analyze large data sets. You place data and ideas into groups based on their relationships with each other.

Start by gathering data from multiple sources, focusing on anything pertinent to your problem. Then, define categories and sort that data into groups. Label each group and analyze potential connections for patterns and potential root causes.

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For my team’s challenges, I could grab data from exit interviews, performance metrics, and qualitative surveys from clients and team members. Natural buckets like Training Deficiencies or Lack of Support might surface, and connections between data would show them as points to begin addressing immediately.

Pareto Charts

If you’ve been around project management, you’ve heard of the Pareto Principle or the 80/20 Rule. Succinctly, it’s the concept that things in life aren’t distributed equally. As in, 80% of your company’s production comes from 20% of its workers.

Applied to RCA, a Pareto chart operates from the underlying concept that a few root causes are responsible for most of your problems.

Start with a list of potential causes related to your problem. Then, you count every time to see each cause affecting the outcome in your data. The causes with higher frequency tend to be the “bigger challenges” to solve.

For instance, while going through my 5 Whys exercise earlier, we could categorize my team’s frustrations and count instances where it appeared in the data. Inadequate training may have appeared 15 times, while high workload only appeared 5 times.

I would read this chart and see we need to focus on training opportunities, as that would more effectively address the root cause of our retention issue. This chart helps you spend time on the weightier root causes and make a greater impact.

Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA)

RCAs often take place after a problem emerges. However, an FMEA focuses on identifying failure points before they break. In this process, you assess possible root causes for failure and prepare actions to mitigate problems.

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Part of the FMEA is to rate from 1-10 the severity, occurrence, and detectability of each failure mode. Or, basically:

• How bad would it be if it happened?
• How likely is it to happen?
• How easily can we tell it’s happening?

From there, you derive a Risk Priority Number and build plans to address the highest-risk failure points. It’s a great way to sniff out problems early and prioritize limited resources toward the biggest potential challenges.

Start Your Root Cause Analysis With Our Free Template

You can run these RCA tools without specialized resources. Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets can help you accomplish this process. Some specialized data-driven tools, such as Minitab or Tableau, can help with more complex challenges.

At HubSpot, we see many opportunities where a root cause analysis can help your marketing team. So many, in fact, that we compiled our best tools and resources into a template. Open this template in Word, Excel, Google Docs or Sheets and follow our guided steps through a complete RCA.

Inside our template, you’ll find places to track event dates, customer details, and descriptions of problems. You can then assign investigators, track possible root causes, and build suggested solutions.

This template will help you make informed, data-driven decisions and focus on consistent organizational improvements.

Don’t Fear the Root Cause Analysis

A good root cause analysis should make you a tad nervous.

Confronting underlying issues with organizational problems requires asking tough questions, sharing openly and honestly, and being vulnerable with your role and responsibilities. It’s a humbling process at times.

But, I think it’s also an important process. Follow the steps behind an RCA and use the tools and data at your disposal, and you’ll find the real issues holding you back from success.

If you’re looking to build toward long-term achievement, don’t let fear limit you.

Dig deep and find the keys to victory.

Video is quickly becoming the preferred tool for most marketers to connect with and reach new audiences.

Branding videos are undeniably effective — including a video on a landing page can boost conversion rates by over 80%, and the mere mention of the word “video” in your email subject line increases open rates by 19%.

For me, a great video can spark curiosity, get me asking questions, or even make me feel emotional.

But what separates great brand videos from those that fall flat? Here’s a look at what makes video marketing successful, and five examples of brands that got it right.

Table of Contents

• What makes a successful brand video?
• Five Examples of Great Branding Videos

What makes a successful brand video?

What is a brand video? Any video that promotes your brand.

What makes a successful brand video? Any video that reaches your target audience and causes the desired reaction.

For example, if I’ve just launched a new outdoor clothing brand, my target audience might be people who are interested in camping or other outdoor activities. My desired reaction is for potential customers to visit my website or social media pages.

As a result, my video should focus on what my product does, not what my product is. This could mean creating a short video of hikers exploring a new trail or campers setting up next to a lake, all while wearing my clothing.

I wouldn’t show prices or talk about specific product lines; I’d just show my gear being used in real-life situations. At the end of the video, I’d showcase the company name and website.

Then, I measure the reaction. Have my visitor numbers gone up? Have users left comments on social media pages or sent direct messages? If yes, then my video was a success. If not, I need to go back to the drawing board.

Key Features of a Branding Video

No two marketing videos are the same. Some target awareness, others drive conversions, and some focus on providing information.

Regardless of the intent, however, all great videos share five key features:

• Clarity: Great videos have focus and purpose. They have a clear message and use clear language and images to get it across. They also waste no time in getting to the point. While there’s no hard-and-fast rule here, ads should stay in the 30-second to 1-minute range for maximum impact.

• Specificity: For branding video ads to work, they must target a specific audience. For example, if you’re selling top-of-the-line car care products, your audience is car owners. Make your ad too general, and it won’t reach your target audience.

• Authenticity: While it may be quicker and cheaper to make inauthentic videos using stock footage or actors as stand-ins for real customers, users can tell when you don’t put in the effort. Want better engagement? Put real people talking about real experiences on the screen.

• Quality: Your branding video doesn’t need the budget of a blockbuster movie, but it should look and sound good. Think clear images, crisp colors, and clear audio. If your messaging is great but your quality is “meh,” your video won’t have the same impact.

• Consistency: All videos act as ambassadors of your brand. As a result, it’s important to use consistent logos, fonts, colors, and designs to ensure users can easily recognize your products.

I know — it’s a lot to consider when planning your brand video and your overall video marketing strategy. If you need help getting your ideas off the ground, try HubSpot’s free AI video tool Clip Creator.

Five Examples of Great Branding Videos

1. Tasty

The goal: Increasing brand awareness.

Video can help your business reach new audiences and attract new viewers to your social media pages and website, which is likely why “increase brand awareness” is the number one reason brands use video.

Take this video from Tasty, a Buzzfeed brand:

Ultimately, Tasty‘s video isn’t meant to sell any products (at least, not directly) — instead, it‘s simply meant to entertain new audiences and, ultimately, increase awareness of Tasty’s brand.

Why I Think It Works

The video works because it’s entertaining. It’s silly, fun to watch, and provides a small but welcome diversion. Yes, it mentions Tasty, but that isn’t the focus of the video. Instead, the ad provides a jumping-off point for viewers to learn more about food and recipes — which just happen to be on the Tasty channel.

2. Fabletics

The goal: Driving new sales.

Consider how you might create entertaining or informative videos with the sole purpose of increasing brand exposure.

Ultimately, brand awareness can foster trust and increase brand equity, so it plays a critical role in your company’s bottom line.

To highlight this point, here’s a video that I think makes a good example. This video highlights Kate Hudson’s company, Fabletics:

While at first glance it might look like a somewhat random video of Kate Hudson running through the Aspen wilderness, it’s actually an effective example of a video designed to increase sales without appearing like, well, an ad.

For instance, while the video portrays Hudson in a range of workout gear from her October Fabletics collection, it also incorporates an exclusive interview with the celebrity to discuss family, nature, and growing up in the mountains.

Add in a gorgeous Aspen backdrop, and viewers might be fooled by the true purpose of the video: to sell Fabletics clothing.

Why I Think It Works

Ads that don’t look like ads are becoming more commonplace.

This ad works because it leverages Hudson’s well-known name and combines it with a popular clothing category: Athleisure. Show both in tandem and I’d say you’ve got a winning ad formula.

3. Gillette

The goal: Growing a social media community.

Did you know that four of the top six channels global consumers use to watch videos are social channels? Ultimately, many marketers use video to attract visitors to a company’s social pages.

Consider, for instance, this #ShaveItOff video by Gillette partner The McFarlands:

While the video is undoubtedly entertaining to watch, it also serves a powerful purpose: to send some of The McFarlands‘ 2 million followers back to Gillette’s own social channels.

Best of all, the hashtag #ShaveItOff can be found on Gillette’s Instagram page as well, ensuring viewers can find the brand regardless of which social channel they prefer.

Why I Think It Works

Social media is one of the fastest-growing platforms for product sales. In part, this is thanks to a concept known as “ambient shopping.”

Unlike intentional shopping, which sees customers seeking out a particular product or service, ambient shopping happens when users are scrolling social media or watching streaming services and come across an interesting product.

This video works because it features well-known TikTokers doing exactly what their audience has come to expect — only this time, it points back to a partner product page.

4. HubSpot

The goal: Educating customers.

Video can be an incredibly effective tool for education. This how-to video from HubSpot Marketing dives into a game-changing technology that’s transforming the ecommerce world for small businesses: text-to-image AI tools.

Many people learn best through visuals, which is why video can be a phenomenal tool for educating prospects and even customers.

Consider how you might incorporate educational videos into your own content strategy in unique ways – for instance, perhaps you include video demos for interested prospects, or how-to tutorials for new users of your product.

Why I Think It Works

HubSpot is a well-known resource for free and comprehensive content.

Of course, our ultimate objective here at HubSpot is to create new customer connections, but this video shows the power of providing something of value for free to help kickstart a reciprocal relationship.

5. Microsoft

The goal: Building brand authority.

Similar to the reason listed above, the fifth reason brands use video is to build brand authority on a subject and demonstrate expertise.

Ideally, this means when people are searching for help on a certain topic, your brand will show up. After watching your videos, if viewers feel they‘ve gained unique insight, they’ll trust your brand more and explore other offerings.

Consider what happens when I search “How to run a vlookup” in Google. When I click on the video section (since I prefer learning about vlookups through visuals like video), Microsoft is the first two video results:

In this example, Microsoft is demonstrating its brand expertise when it comes to its Excel product — and, more widely, anything related to technology and data.

This provides Microsoft with a good opportunity to showcase its brand authority while attracting new visitors to its website.

Why I Think It Works

When I do a Google search, it’s rare I make it to page 2.

In most cases, I’m clicking on one of the top five results, and at most I’m heading down through the top 10.

Why? Because higher rankings are associated with increased authority on a subject, product, or service.

Microsoft succeeds here because it’s (still) capturing the top 2 spots.

Branding Video: Getting Noticed for All the Right Reasons

Video gets you noticed. Branding videos tip the scales — prospective and current customers get closer or farther away depending on how well you package and convey your message.

My best advice? Don’t get locked into a single branding approach. Different videos have different purposes. Some are designed to generate interest, while others drive new sales and still others look to build community or build authority.

What’s important isn’t replicating what other brands have done, but rather defining a goal for your video, and then measuring how successfully your video achieved that goal.

Take a look at The Ultimate Guide to Video Marketing to learn more about how you can create a powerful video marketing strategy for your own brand.

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

Traditional marketing versus digital marketing has become a hot topic among marketing professionals.

I set out to learn the pros and cons of each and return with my findings so that you can make an informed decision about marketing your brand.

I’ll go over what the two terms mean, and how they work together. Then, I’ll dive deeper into traditional marketing, which sometimes feels like it doesn’t get a fair shake in the current digital-dominated landscape.

But if you’re trying to choose between the two, I’ll give away the ending before we begin: the answer is both.

Table of Contents

• What is traditional marketing?
• What is digital marketing?
• Traditional Marketing vs. Digital Marketing
• Types of Traditional Marketing
• Importance of Traditional Marketing
• Pros and Cons of Traditional Marketing

What is traditional marketing?

Traditional marketing is all marketing that happens offline. This includes print, broadcast, direct mail, phone, and out-of-home advertising like billboards and posters.

It’s called the traditional method because it’s the way marketing was done pre-internet. But even though the contemporary market has incorporated newer methods, traditional marketing isn’t going away.

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What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing, on the other hand, is any marketing that’s conducted online. Examples here include paid social media ads, email marketing, and PPC advertising, along with content marketing, SEO, and much more.

This post won’t go into all the details, but for a deep dive into digital marketing, check out What is Digital Marketing: Everything You Need to Know.

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As the world becomes more digital, the way we market has evolved. Not only is digital marketing sometimes more cost-effective than traditional, but it’s also a more direct way to connect with target audiences globally.

Digital marketing has now overtaken traditional marketing as the primary way to reach consumers. But really, these two strategies coexist, and mixing methods is becoming the norm.

In today’s landscape, it’s no surprise that digital marketing is an increasingly important revenue driver. In fact, 78% of businesses that use social selling outperform those that don’t.

Disadvantages to digital marketing do exist, however. Chief among them are privacy and security concerns. According to the same 2024 report, online data privacy is valued as a human right by 74% of survey respondents.

In response, the tide has shifted toward more safeguards, with 84% of marketers saying it’s affected their strategy. Apart from that, digital marketing faces the challenge of people being fed up with disruptive ads, like pop-ups and video, while viewing offline ads favorably.

What about AI?

In 2024, according to our State of Marketing Report, 85% of marketers say generative AI has changed how they will create content, and marketers using AI are “95% more likely to say their marketing strategy was very effective this year than those who don’t.”

AI is, of course, changing the game for everyone — including the marketing industry — and it’s yet to be seen how it will affect the relationship between traditional and digital. But one thing is for sure: it’s currently the single biggest trend driving industry growth.

Types of Traditional Marketing

Now that we understand both sides of the coin, let’s take a deeper look at traditional marketing. It can take many forms, but the major types are as follows.

Print Media

Print media uses newspapers, magazines, and other printed materials to market to potential customers. This option is scalable, from locally to globally read publications.

A now-infamous example of an attention-grabbing newspaper ad is Norwegian Airlines’ “Brad is single” campaign, which capitalized on the breakup of a celebrity couple. I’m not one to gossip, but if you’re looking to draw eyes to your low, low prices, that’s a way to do it.

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Broadcasting

This refers to TV and radio commercials and aims to create brand awareness. Broadcasting relies on repetition, as the same ad will play over and over.

An ad that has always stuck with me is for Wendy’s hamburgers – where a woman examines the competitor’s offering and asks, “Where’s the beef?”

Originally aired in 1984, the commercial later became so iconic that I can still call up the woman’s voice in my head — even though I didn’t see the ad when it appeared. Forty years later, I’d say that’s good advertising.

Direct Mail

Direct mail is when marketing materials are sent straight to your door.

These can be letters, postcards, flyers, catalogs, or even gifts, and the point is to connect with an individual directly — unlike with print or broadcast, where the aim is to reach as many people as possible.

An example of a direct mail campaign where the mailing matched its purpose comes from Ikea. To market one of its side tables, a small pop-up version of the table came encased in the Ikea catalog.

It caught my attention for the perfect parallel between Ikea’s flat-packed furniture and the paper miniature meant to advertise it.

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Phone

Telemarketing, which includes cold-calling, is another traditional method for reaching a prospect directly. Direct phone marketing goes a step further than direct mail in aiming to generate a connection with the prospective customer.

I admit I had to look up an example for this one, and it’s difficult to find much information since calls are so ephemeral.

But I found a leading telemarketing campaign from Microsoft in 2009 when sales reps were calling to sell the Office Suite software. Sources say the company generated $1 million in revenue from this campaign alone.

Out-of-Home (OOH)

OOH marketing means it occurs outside your home, and the primary examples are static billboards, posters, signs on buses, and painted wallscapes.

This is a form of visual marketing that most often uses images to convey its message. OOH is location-based and aims to market to people passing by a particular spot.

As someone who spent much of my life walking around cities as an urban researcher, this type of marketing is the most likely to call my attention.

A smart example that comes to mind is the Coca-Cola billboards that appeared in European cities in 2019. The image takes the brand’s recognizable white ribbon and turns it into an arm, with a hand that points to a recycling bin on the street.

The campaign hints at Coke’s promise to make its bottles fully recyclable. And I personally, love this type of interaction between the ad and the urban environment.

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Importance of Traditional Marketing

It might already be pretty clear from the above examples, but I want to break down some of the reasons why traditional marketing is still important alongside digital marketing.

Trust

Connecting with potential customers is at the heart of marketing. And recent surveys show that when asked about their most trusted advertising formats, traditional marketing channels fill out the top slots, with print ads ranking first.

So, even if it seems like we live in a digital marketing landscape, when it comes to trust, what’s tried and true works better.

Loyalty

Given that I hardly receive mail anymore, I was surprised to learn that direct mail ranked third in the same trust surveys.

In addition, according to a 2024 post from the Data & Marketing Association, personalized mailings are set to make a comeback with contemporary marketers for their ability to convert into long-lasting loyalty.

Reach

Looking at broadcasting, I was skeptical about how effective radio ads could still be, but when I got my hands on the results of a 2023 Edison Research survey, it turned out that if you spend any time in a car, you’re likely to be listening to AM/FM radio (76% of listeners are).

That makes you a perfect audience for ads in that channel.

Cold-calling was the other one I wasn’t so sure of. But just like direct mail, cold-calling effectiveness is on the rise — and again I was surprised by the numbers.

Cognism’s 2024 State of Cold Calling Report announced that the success rate of B2B cold-calling doubled from 2023 to 2024 (from roughly 2% to 4%).

Pros and Cons of Traditional Marketing

Compared to digital marketing, traditional marketing has both pros and cons.

Pro: Local Audiences

Traditional marketing is great when you want to reach a local or niche community. If you’re operating in a small market, highly-specific ad placements can help you reach the right people.

Pro: Repetition

Another advantage is repetition of ads. And it’s not just with TV commercials or radio jingles that might get stuck in your head. When thinking about OOH, it’s easy to imagine how walking past the same bus shelter billboard daily increases brand visibility and awareness.

Pro: Credibility

And that leads me to credibility. With brand recall, especially in the public spaces we occupy on a daily basis, ads start to feel familiar, like any part of the environment, and add to credibility.

Con: Cost

Traditional marketing can be pricier than digital marketing. In 2024, an average newspaper ad could run upwards of $750, while an online ad 3-5 cents per click.

Beyond that part of the budget will be wasted on casting a wide net and getting your ad in front of people outside your target.

Con: Targeting

This brings me to precision targeting: it’s an integral part of the digital marketing world — and a part that traditional marketing really can’t compete with. If you need granular segmentation, none of the marketing channels above will give you that.

Con: Measurability

Alongside the inability to precisely zoom in on certain target audiences, measuring the results of ad campaigns is not as straightforward as with online marketing.

There are no real-time results or optimizations. And the process of changing an ad will take longer if you realize it’s underperforming.

Can traditional and digital marketing really work together?

Absolutely. My biggest takeaway after sinking my teeth into the stats is that not only is there room for both strategies to exist, but it can be an advantage to double up and use them together.

While traditional marketing can win over local audiences, it doesn’t offer a granular way to target. That gap can be filled with digital marketing.

And with marked distinctions between the two methods, I’d say it’s more a question of multiplying options than pitting the two against each other.

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

Ranging from brief social posts to deep-dive digital guides, I’ve written thousands of pieces of content for SaaS companies, small businesses, government offices, major nonprofits, and my own websites.

These pieces of content were tracked and analyzed to gauge their success, but all using unique measuring sticks. How? Using a tailored content scoring process.

With your own tailored content scorecard, you can create a data-driven process for measuring your individual content marketing success. I’ve gathered examples from my own websites and brands across industries, plus tips to help you create a powerful content scoring system.

I even have a metric that one entrepreneur says can impact conversions by 50% — measured using a free tool. Excited? Let’s get scoring!

Table of Contents

• What is content scoring?
• Why is content scoring important?
• How to Score Content
• Content Scoring Best Practices
• Content Scoring Tools
• ChatGPT For Scoring
• What’s a good content score?

What is content scoring?

Content scoring is the process of measuring the success of your content marketing. Metrics such as views, engagement, shares, and backlinks are tracked to analyze content quality and performance.

The resulting scorecard helps steer future content creation.

Why is content scoring important?

Let’s zoom in on the three big benefits of content scoring, starting with the term every marketer loves to hate: single source of truth.

Content scoring helps create a single source of truth.

93% of marketers with a single source of truth for data report that it’s beneficial for their organization, but only 65% of marketers actually have one.

Lack of communication and alignment between departments is a top concern of marketers, per our 2024 State of Marketing survey. A scoring system unifies teams and facilities better communication, while also acting as a roadmap for populating your editorial calendar.

Pro tip: Both your sales and marketing teams must be involved in the creation of the scoring system to maximize its potential.

Content scoring helps you leverage expertise.

I‘m not an expert in social listening and TikTok content performance.

Guess what? I use Later to help me with that, which means I don’t need to be. The tools you use to score your content will leverage incredible amounts of expertise and put data-driven insights at your fingertips.

While you can use generic tools such as ChatGPT (and I’ll share a prompt in a minute), a huge benefit of the content scoring process is choosing specialized tools that deepen your understanding of your content.

Content scoring helps you prove ROI.

Return on investment is always a priority for marketing teams and organizations as a whole. But then, why does so much data fall through the cracks?

The numbers matter: Over half of marketing decisions are influenced by marketing analytics.

Yet data’s falling through the cracks. 87% of marketers reported that data was their company’s most underutilized asset.

Given that 50% of marketers plan on increasing their content marketing investment in 2025, marketing teams need to quantify content’s performance and prove ROI with as much detail as possible.

How to Score Content

Let‘s walk through the steps to score your content. After explaining each step, I’m going to show you how this looks using the example of a blog post from my website, Walk The Camino Portugués.

There‘s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to content scoring. It’s important for you to find a system that works, and you’ll — wait for it — actually use it (happily, I hope). Use this as your starting point.

Step 1: Choose which content you’ll score.

Not all content can be scored the same way. Social media content is different from email, which has different metrics from website content. Start this process by choosing which content you’re going to be scoring. Options include:

• Social media posts.
• Email marketing.
• Landing pages.
• Product pages.
• Blog posts.
• Videos.

As an example, I‘m going to be analyzing blog content for my travel site. Let’s look at which metrics belong on the scorecard.

Step 2: Choose your metrics.

You should consider key metrics related to content quality AND content performance. There are many numbers that you can choose from, and they don’t all need to be included on every scorecard (your marketing team will give you an ear full if you try).

Choose what matters most to your target audience and your business objectives. Here are some suggestions — notice that these include both positive and negative metrics (more on this in a minute).

1. Video percentage watched.
2. Reader satisfaction.
3. Impressions/views.
4. Optimization score.
5. Follows/unfollows.
6. Video view rate.
7. Time on page.
8. Conversions.
9. Bounce rate.
10. Scroll depth.
11. Readability.
12. Comments.
13. Backlinks.
14. Exit rate.
15. Shares.
16. Clicks.
17. Saves.

What I’m measuring: The metrics that matter most to me with my new travel website are SEO score, website traffic, readability, and Pinterest saves. Given that this is a new website, I‘ll track SEO score and readability upfront and I’ll measure traffic and saves over a period of six months.

Step 3: Choose tools to score content.

The numbers you‘ll get from tools aren’t all the same. Some tools will score content by assigning an objective number, while others will gather analytical data.

For example, SurferSEO might assign a blog post an optimization score of 72. This number reflects how my content performed against platform or industry benchmarks. An engagement tool, on the other hand, may share that content’s engagement rate is up 5%.

The 72 and 5%, while both important, aren‘t directly comparable. It’s like comparing apples and oranges — keep this in mind as you parse your data.

Consider these tools to score your content:

• Google Search Console (GSC): search visibility.
• Google Analytics 4 (GA4): website traffic.
• Hemingway App: content readability.
• SurferSEO: website optimization.
• SharedCount: social shares.
• ChatGPT: content analysis.
• Later: social analytics.
• Semrush: readability.

It‘s worth noting that some insights won’t be discoverable using a content scoring method. Some extremely valuable insights can only be gathered through manual review of top-performing content and looking for trends. This is ideally done over a period with significant data, such as a year-end review.

My scorecard: I’ll be using GA4, SurferSEO, the Hemingway App, and SharedCount to create my content scoring model.

Step 4: Create a scorecard.

Once you‘ve established your scoring criteria, you need to store all of your scored content in one place for easy review. This can be done in a spreadsheet, Notion, within a tool’s analytics interface — I share options for this below.

For those who’d like to create their own scorecard for their unique scoring system, you can input data into a simple table.

Note: The numbers you‘ve collected all have different values. For example, a blog post’s SEO score of 78 isn’t directly comparable to getting 245 social shares.

Some marketers will resolve this by ranking all of their data points on a scale of 10, then adding these up at the end. I‘ll show you a screenshot of this type of table created with ChatGPT in a minute.

Personally, I’m choosing to just list the original numbers and evaluate them individually, as I think it dilutes the data too much to convert everything to a 1-10 scale.

I’ve done this below with my website data:

Article	SEO Score	Readability	Search Ranking*	Shares*
Planning guide	92	Grade 6	3	147
Scallop shell explained	84	Grade 8	8	38
Luggage transfer	98	Grade 7	6	12

*This is a new website, and there’s no data for these points yet, so these values are used as fillers.

Step 5: Use to inform content strategy.

Use the insights from your content scoring strategy to help you create high-quality content. When you have more than 12 months of data, you can look at seasonal trends and use these insights to guide the creation of your marketing calendar for the year (free template here).

As a content manager for businesses, these insights guide 80% of my content creation for the year.

Looking at my own scorecard, I know that I need to improve the readability of all of my pieces (see more on this in best practices). The data on rankings and traffic will prioritize which pieces need to be updated first.

Content Scoring Best Practices

Let’s look at some of the best practices for your content scoring process.

Find the silent data.

Jake Ward, founder of Kleo, suggests that you engage with your silent data in addition to the typical (loud) data points. Listening to the loud and silent data in your business can look like:

• Engagement + disengagement.
• Purchases + abandoned carts.
• Clicks + hovers.

“Don’t just focus on the obvious metrics like clicks or open rates, but also on the data that isn’t making noise,” Jake shared.

Choose metrics intentionally (new brand vs. established).

Key metrics for judging a new brand are sometimes different from those you’d use for an established brand. Established websites can see results for some key metrics much faster, like:

• Search rankings.
• Social shares.
• Backlinks.

A new website might need to wait months before it sees these numbers start to build momentum. As a result, I’d pay more attention to metrics, like:

• Time on page.
• Readability.
• Comments.

One of these metrics is much more important than most people (even marketers) realize — readability.

Don’t ignore readability.

Alex Hormozi, founder of Acquisition, shared the power of improving readability in one of his “Mozi Money Minute” email blasts. He recommends simplifying your language to the third-grade level (age 8 or 9) using the Hemingway App.

“I once ran all my emails and web pages through this process and got a permanent 50% boost,” Hormozi shared with his email subscribers. “There are very few things that always work. But, this tactic is about as close as it gets.”

I‘d never used the Hemingway App before, and I thought my article’s content score would be fine. I was surprised to discover that my article was given a grade 6 readability score and would require edits to 84 sentences to maximize the readability per Hormozi’s advice.

Source

Leverage those positive metrics.

Having content that performs well should do more than just cause high-fives in the marketing department — it should also be leveraged as social proof. I spend a lot of time reviewing marketing materials online and I find that this is overlooked on 90% of websites.

Here’s an example of how Forbes leverages their positive metrics by publicly sharing article views:

Source

Why does it matter? Engagement begets more engagement. Tap into this self-fulfilling prophecy by displaying positive metrics on your website. Here are some ways to feature your positive metrics:

• Webpage backlinks: “As featured in” section
• Blog post views: Share total number of views (tutorial)
• Blog engagement: Display comment count
• Product downloads: Share the number of lifetime purchases or downloads
• Page shares: Display shared count (Social Warfare Pro plugin)
• Video views: Pin high-performing videos (TikTok tutorial, Instagram tutorial)
• Social followers: “Join X followers” website widget

Content Scoring Tools

I shared a lot of individual tools above, and I know that the number of options can be overwhelming for beginners. To help simplify it, I’m going to highlight a few powerful tools below that can solve most content scoring needs.

Important note: While I don’t spend time on them, Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console are non-negotiable tracking tools that every website must have set up.

WordPress

Price: Free, with one paid tool featured below (Social Warfare Pro, $29 per year).

With a few standard plugins, WordPress users can customize their dashboard to include a number of important scoring metrics. This enables you to analyze your website content right within your site dashboard, without throwing a dozen more steps into your workflow.

Here, you can see five powerful metrics at a glance right within the “posts” page of my WordPress dashboard:

Source

Here’s a key for the boxed icons above:

• Stats: Jetpack (free).
• Comments: WordPress (free).
• Social shares: Social Warfare Pro (paid).
• Traffic light: SEO score by Yoast (free).
• Feather: Readability score by Yoast (free).

Your entire team will already have access to the website, which avoids extra costs of having to pay for “seats” on subscription-based platforms.

You can even sort content based on certain metrics, like shares or comments. You can see how that looks here on my main site, where I’ve sorted my blog posts in order of most comments to fewest comments:

Source

WordPress does have limitations, though. Data can’t be separated and analyzed by date, which can make finding specific relevant information difficult. Google Analytics is much more powerful for those advanced features but is overwhelming for beginners looking for at-a-glance data.

SEO Writing Assistant by Semrush

Price: Free plan, then $139.95 per month.

This is another tool that focuses on written website content, like articles, landing pages, product listings, etc. SEO Writing Assistant has a document-like interface where you can write content from scratch or paste in existing text. This tool has a scoring system that evaluates your content’s:

• Readability (free).
• SEO (free).
• Originality (paid).
• Tone of voice (paid).

Source

It gathers data for those four metrics and assigns a single score to your website content. This allows content assets to be easily compared and ranked.

I don‘t rely on this tool for my own content or my clients’ content, but I do think it‘s a great resource for people with straightward needs who aren’t brand loyal to other more specific tools.

Later

Price: Free plan, then $16.67 per month when billed annually.

While the first two tools focused on owned content on your own website, Later analyzes social media content. This is an incredibly robust social scheduling platform that pulls huge amounts of data for you to sift through and analyze your content’s performance.

I‘ve been using Later for years, but I can’t share analytics screenshots without revealing private client information. Instead, here‘s a summary of the analytics capabilities as described on Later’s website:

Source

A few features I love:

• Content sorting based on whichever metric you value most.
• Finding your audience’s most active times online.
• Social listening.

I’ve worked on teams that use other scheduling tools — sometimes very pricey ones — but Later is my preferred platform. It has an enjoyable interface and puts a ton of analytics data at your fingertips (without being overwhelming).

ChatGPT For Scoring

Would I rely on ChatGPT for my entire content scoring process? No, I personally would choose tools that are specialized and store my data for me in a more convenient way.

But maybe you‘ll find ChatGPT to be a fast and convenient way to evaluate your content. Note that ChatGPT can’t scrape content from social media, so it’s best used on your own website or XLS files.

Here’s a prompt for scoring website content:

You’re a content marketer trying to score the below [blog URLs/pages/product listings] based on readability, SEO, and ability to retain readers. Please generate a score on a scale of 1-10 for each of the above key metrics, then evaluate and score each piece of content below. Provide your data in a table.

Source

Scoring AI-generated content.

AI content can be valuable for your brand, but it needs to be leveraged carefully. Here are a few insightful statistics from our State of Marketing trends report:

• Only 6% of marketers report using AI to produce entire pieces of content for them.
• 95% of marketers who are using generative AI to write copy have to edit the text, with 44% saying they make significant edits.
• 60% of marketers fear the concern that AI can harm their brand’s reputation through plagiarism or bias.

When you’re ranking AI-generated content, assess it upfront for inaccuracies and plagiarism. When you’re gauging its performance, assess time spent on page, bounce rate, and conversion rate. Let content intelligence be your GPS.

If you’re going to choose AI tools, go for reputable tools that prioritize high-quality content, like the HubSpot AI Content Writer tool.

What’s a good content score?

There are mountains of data available on content performance. Need to know what the average X (previously Twitter) engagement rate for the finance sector is? Three percent. But, finding and leveraging that data for every single platform and industry would be tedious at best and impossible at worst.

Some software, like SEO Writing Assistant by Semrush, will use their own proprietary scoring system to combine several scoring factors into one number. No single software provides a complete picture, though.

How you’ll get the most value from content scoring: Identifying above or below-average content performance can only come from having month-over-month, year-over-year analytics and comparing your own datasets.

My Scoring Example

A good example is my Portuguese Camino luggage transfer guide. My article received a score of 6.9 out of 10 with Semrush’s tool, which earned it the label of “good.” However, when I looked at why it was given that score, I disagreed with it for a few reasons.

I chose to write a more in-depth guide. My article is 1,975 words long, while this tool is telling me to trim it back to 617 words. I’m a thorough writer, not a brief one (have you noticed?).

The tool also automatically assigned keyword targets from my article, many of which were incorrect. When I manually edited the keywords, my content’s score automatically went up to 7.7 out of 10.

Tools can be powerful, but keep prompting and tweaking them to personalize and tailor the results.

Final Thoughts

When I check on the content‘s performance, I’m excited. I’ll either discover cause for celebration or an opportunity to improve.

Speaking of improvement, I have my work cut out for me by simplifying my vocabulary and shortening my sentences to improve my readability score. I hope that these tools provide that same enthusiasm and direction for you (even if it means that you still have some work to do, like me).

Media buying was once a world of direct deals and closed negotiations. But with the rise of digital media and platforms to buy and sell, media buying isn’t only for the biggest brands anymore.

If you’ve been looking for new ways to get your ads in front of your target audience, I’m going to walk you through how to do just that — from how media buying works to the processes for carrying it out.

Then, I’ll take you through the best platforms to get you started, with tips and advice from marketing experts along the way.

Ready? Grab your free media plan template, and let’s dive in.

Table of Contents

• What is media buying?
• Media Buying vs. Media Planning
• Types of Media Buying
• How Digital Media Buying Works
• The Media Buying Process
• Media Buying Tips
• Best Digital Media Buying Platforms

Exactly what is a media buyer, then? Whether they’re watching a TV show or scrolling through a website, media buyers are the ones who get brands in front of their target market.

They’re also responsible for negotiating with publishers for ad inventory, managing budgets, and optimizing ads to improve campaign performance.

As an outbound strategy, media buying requires a well-thought-out plan. Rex Gelb, senior director of paid advertising and affiliate marketing at HubSpot, says one of the biggest mistakes brands make is not thinking through their marketing goals.

“Some ad placements might be good for one set of goals, but bad for another. Let’s say you’re an airline and your focus is impressions and awareness, rather than an immediate sale, you can buy a placement that is known to get cheap impressions,” he says.

Gelb continues, “Now, let’s say you’re a CEO who wants to promote a ‘letter to our customers.’ In this instance, what you’ll care about is cheap clicks. Buying cheap impressions, which made sense in the previous example, no longer helps you accomplish your goal.”

That’s why media planning is such an important step, as it helps you get the most out of your ads.

Media Buying vs. Media Planning

Media buying and media planning have separate but connected roles in an ad campaign. Media planners outline the campaign’s goals, focusing on overall strategy, and then media buyers carry out those goals.

The planning phase determines what media will be most effective to reach a particular audience. And the buying phase picks up from there with deal negotiations and budget management. It‘s also important to note that media planning isn’t solely for advertising — it’s for any media a brand puts out there.

However, in small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), the job may be done by the same person or team.

Types of Media Buying

Media buying falls into two broad categories: direct and programmatic. I’ll explain them below.

Direct Buying

In this case, ad space is purchased directly from a publisher. It involves direct negotiations and relationships rather than using automation or intermediaries.

The benefits of this type of buying are that you can guarantee ad placement in a specific location (say, a newspaper that your target audience reads), customize agreements, and foster ongoing relationships.

Best for: Direct buying works best when you’re trying to build trust with local or niche communities and small markets.

Programmatic Buying

This type of buying entered the sphere with digital media and it automates the buying and selling process. Using algorithms to place ads, exchanges happen in real-time.

The benefits of programmatic buying are that it allows precision targeting, makes it possible to participate in many exchanges at once, and can lower the cost of placing ads.

Best for: With the ability to micro-focus the target audience, this type works well for limited budgets who want to reduce ad spending.

The types of media buying have to do with how you go about purchasing ad space. But a related concept is channels.

There are also two channel types: digital (online), which can include websites, social media, and search engines, e.g., and traditional (offline), which may be TV, print, radio, billboards, etc.

While traditional channels necessitate direct deals, digital channels can operate programmatically or directly.

How Digital Media Buying Works

There are three components in the programmatic buying structure:

• Demand-side platforms (DSP). This is where advertisers and ad agencies – that is, media buyers – set up their campaigns, bid on ad inventory, and optimize their ads. It’s one-half of the automated exchange marketplace and allows media buying from multiple sources in real time.
• Supply-side platforms (SSP). This is the other half of the exchange marketplace. It’s where publishers sell their ad inventory.
• Ad exchanges. These are virtual marketplaces that connect the DSPs to the SSPs, so that advertisers and publishers can buy and sell ad inventory through real-time bidding (RTB). Marketplaces can be open, meaning anyone can join, or private, where publishers limit who can participate in the auction.

You may have also heard of ad networks, which could be considered a fourth component in this media-buying ecosystem. These platforms aggregate ad inventory from various sources and match it to advertisers’ needs, serving as intermediaries in the process. Think Google Adsense or Meta Audience Network.

But, as a quick note, programmatic buying also allows direct deals. This is known as programmatic direct buying, which sounds pretty confusing since these are usually two opposing types. The key difference is that ad inventory is sold at a fixed cost per thousand impressions (CPM), with no bidding.

As programmatic buying continues to shift in new directions along with the tech landscape, media buying will also shift.

A recent example of how quickly these shifts can occur came with the rollout of Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) in 2021. At the time, it wasn’t clear how opting out of tracking would impact targeting and conversions. Now, we know it contributed to significant declines in ad revenue.

Still, programmatic buying isn’t going anywhere and many businesses — especially SMBs — are finding success by combining media types and channels.

Successful media buying requires “multi-channel precision targeting,” says Aaron Whittaker, ​​VP of demand generation & marketing at Thrive Internet Marketing Agency.

“Connected TV (CTV) buying has become increasingly important [and] platforms like Roku Advertising have allowed our smaller clients to access television audiences at a fraction of traditional TV costs,” he told me. “The ability to layer first-party data with viewing habits has made these campaigns particularly effective.”

But the most surprising insight Whittaker shared with me? “Sometimes the most effective media buys come from combining traditional and digital channels. For instance, retargeting users who’ve been exposed to radio ads with digital display has shown promising results for local businesses.”

Want more insight into how programmatic buying can be beneficial for your business? Check out this video covering the top five paid marketing trends.

The Media Buying Process

With programmatic buying continually changing things up for media buyers, the process of media buying isn’t one size fits all. But there are still steps you can follow to keep your team organized, whether you opt for direct or programmatic buying — or a mix of both.

1. Review media plan.

Once the media plan is in place, it’ll be handed off to the media buyer. The plan will include goals, timelines, target audience, and total budget, but it will likely be up to the buyer to decide how the budget is allocated.

Now is the time to think about types of ads, where you’ll run them, and how much money you want to dedicate to various channels.

Free Resource: Get your media plan template here.

2. List media outlets.

With your target audiences in mind, develop a list of media outlets where you’d like to buy ad space. If you plan to use a combination of media types, you can also include DSPs on your list (like the ones recommended later in this article).

3. Submit RFPs.

Now that you have a list of outlets, send them each a request for proposal (RFP). This document will include all your campaign details and ask vendors to respond with proposals that match your goals. The point is to give you a series of proposals to review so you can make decisions on where to place your ads.

Free resource: Use these RFP templates to get you started.

4. Make final decisions.

Once you’ve got the RFP responses in hand, it’s time to make buying decisions. Evaluate how the proposals will help you meet your goals and how they align with your overall ad placement strategy. Then, go ahead and buy the ad space.

5. Send insertion orders.

When your ad placements are final, submit insertion orders (IO) to all the ad inventory vendors. IOs are legal agreements between publishers and advertisers that detail the specifics of an ad campaign (dates, format, placement, etc.) and they’ll require your signature as well as that of the publisher.

6. Deliver the ads.

Somewhere in the background of all this, your creative team was probably already hard at work on developing the actual ads. As a media buyer, you’ll need to coordinate with them to ensure the formats are correct for each medium and that the vendors receive the ads by the deadlines specified in the IO.

7. Monitor results.

The heavy lifting is out of the way, but it doesn’t mean the work is done. After your campaign launches, you’ll need to track its performance.

If you launched digital campaigns, you can monitor results in real time. And if your campaign is underperforming on metrics that were guaranteed by the publishers, negotiate with them for a “makegood” (meaning they’ll make up for the shortfall).

Media Buying Tips

With the media buying process as a general guide, I wanted to dig a little deeper into how to carry it out. While some organizations may have dedicated media buyers, small and medium-sized businesses don’t always have the resources for that, and roles can overlap.

So, with that in mind, I called on experienced marketers to ask for take-home tips on media buying, with a special focus on SMBs and up-and-coming brands.

1. Strategize.

When you’re planning and buying on a smaller budget, settling on a strategy before your campaign can feel even more imperative.

“We recommend an omnichannel approach,” says Jennifer Hall, associate director of agency marketing at Vision Media.

“Media plans are developed based on the brand’s goals, budget, and target audience,” she tells me, adding that prospects are most often reached through a combination of traditional and digital channels, such as “paid social, CTV, print or out-of-home (OOH), and streaming audio.”

2. Identify your target and where to find them.

Determining your target audience and experimenting with where exactly to reach them is another important piece of the media-buying puzzle.

“Focusing on digital platforms that cater to passionate niche communities has been a game-changer,” Maris Laatre, CMO of Bully Max, says. “For example, we’ve used video ads on YouTube to demonstrate the benefits of our products, which drives engagement and builds trust with pet owners.”

Also, finding a space where the competition hasn’t yet caught up has its advantages, she says, mentioning TikTok. “It’s an underutilized platform for ecommerce brands in our niche, but it offers a lot of potential for those willing to experiment.”

3. Set up your campaign.

Whether you’re using a DSP or coordinating direct deals, you’ll need to specify your campaign parameters.

Both programmatic and direct buying have their pros and cons when it comes to getting set up, according to David Hunter, SEO expert and founder of Local Falcon.

In the case of the first option, “it’s automated, which means ad space can be bought in real-time, often at a lower cost, and it helps target specific audiences based on their behavior and preferences. It’s efficient, but you need to monitor it closely to avoid wasting money on clicks that don’t convert.”

“For businesses that value more control or have niche audiences, direct deals with media outlets can work better,” he continues. “It’s slower to set up, but the personal connection with the publisher often makes the investment worth it.”

4. Track the results and optimize.

The most exciting (and possibly scariest) part of launching an ad campaign is tracking its performance.

“It’s not just about choosing a strategy or platform,” Hunter tells me. “You have to track everything — what works, what doesn’t — and adjust quickly.”

“Sometimes what looks great on paper flops when you actually run the campaign. Small changes, like tweaking the timing of an ad or narrowing the audience slightly, can make a massive difference.”

If you decide to go the programmatic route, your next step will be deciding on a DSP.

To put together a list of the leading platforms for media buying, I asked marketers which ones they use and why they’d recommend them. Below is the compiled list, with tips to get you started.

1. Google Display & Video 360

Inside the Google Marketing Platform, you’ll find Display & Video 360. Originally DoubleClick Bid Management, DV360 integrates seamlessly with Google Analytics and other Google products. So, if your team is already using those tools, this may be the right media buying tool for you.

There are five modules in DV360 to build your campaign, manage your audience and creative assets, analyze your data, and access ad inventory from top publishers. It also offers automated bidding and custom targeting using first and third-party data, making it easier to reach the right audience.

Lastly, the platform allows advertisers to not only reach users on websites and YouTube but also CTV.

Best for: Integrating with other Google products and accessing a wide range of tools.

2. The Trade Desk

If you want access to premium publishers, the Trade Desk is one place you’ll want to look.

The platform has ad inventory from influential publishers,like Spotify, ABC, The Wall Street Journal, and ESPN.

One of the platform‘s key features is the AI-driven “Koa,” which uses data from over 600 billion daily queries to determine the smartest and most cost-effective way to run your digital campaign. The Trade Desk also has cross-device targeting capabilities to optimize your campaign’s reach.

Best for: Larger-scale campaigns “because it gives you access to premium publishers and uses AI to help optimize performance,” recommends David Hunter.

3. Amazon DSP

Every time I think Amazon has capped, it comes out with another vertical.

As a top three DSP, Amazon DSP is one of the most used platforms allowing your ads to appear on Amazon-owned websites like Audible and IMDb, and other Amazon partners. In addition, they can show up on Amazon connected devices, like Fire TV, Kindle, and Alexa, giving you a breadth of opportunities to get in front of the right people.

Along with targeting based on demographics and interests, it also allows targeting based on Amazon purchase history, as well as past searches and views, giving it a leg up on the competition.

Brand safety is also a top priority to ensure ads don’t appear in risky or unsuitable environments. The platform monitors real-time bids and site reviews for quality and security to ensure brand protection.

Best for: Your product-focused business. “If a client has a product-focused business, I usually recommend Amazon DSP — it uses Amazon’s consumer data, which is hard to beat for ecommerce,” Hunter says.

4. Wallester

Wallester Business simplifies campaign expense management through its user-friendly platform and application. The service enables you to create virtual and physical cards via separate accounts with customizable daily/monthly limits. You can also generate expense reports in CSV, Excel, or PDF formats, add colleagues to your account, and assign them to specific cards or campaigns.

With Wallester Business, you can avoid failed transactions on popular platforms like Meta, TikTok, Google, X (formerly Twitter), Mailchimp, and more. New users can try the platform by creating the first 300 virtual cards at no cost.

Best for: Sharing virtual cards between media buyers within an organization.

5. AdCritter

AdCritter is a DSP made for small to medium-sized businesses.

The platform has an ad builder and a library of pre-designed templates for businesses that may not have their own creative assets. This means you can get help with ad-making right on their platform.

With AdCritter, media buyers (or even one-person brands) can hand-select the websites they’ll appear on to ensure their ads reach their intended audience. You can also reach consumers based on demographics and behavior.

The real seller, though, might be that it makes TV and digital billboard ads cost-effective through precision targeting and short-term placements.

Best for: SMBs and smaller budgets looking to maximize their ad spending.

6. Adobe Advertising Cloud

In 2017, Adobe launched a powerful DSP to tie with Adobe Audience Manager and Adobe Analytics. Similar to Google, Adobe’s platforms integrate seamlessly, which makes collaboration easier and cross-data analysis simpler.

Adobe also has powerful performance optimization features to maximize return on ad spend (ROAS).

Best for: Integrating with other Adobe products, like Adobe Analytics.

7. Criteo

This platform has access to a large network of premium retailers, making it a great DSP for brands who want to reach online shoppers. Think Best Buy, CVS pharmacy, Macy’s, and Kohls.

They rely on first-party data, instead of third-party cookies, to optimize ads and determine the right time and place to engage shoppers.

Criteo’s flexible attribution models also make data analysis easier for teams.

Best for: Engaging customers across online shopping experiences.

8. StackAdapt

“StackAdapt has become our go-to platform for growing companies – they don’t demand huge minimum spends, and their team delivers solid campaign optimization advice,” says Tristan Harris, senior VP of marketing at LinkBuilder.io.

“What I especially value is their real-time reporting that shows exactly where ads appear and how they perform, eliminating any guesswork about ROI.”

Some of their key features include dynamic retargeting, machine learning optimization, and cross-device capabilities. Contextual targeting is perhaps the leading selling point, which matches ads to online content, making it about users’ interests, and shifts away from behavioral targeting.

Additionally, if your brand is a regulated industry (like alcohol, cannabis, or gambling), StackAdapt can help you strengthen your messaging and maneuver around those challenges.

Best for: Placing ads alongside relevant content through contextual targeting.

9. Simpli.fi

Some DSPs offer pre-segmented audiences for ad campaigns, which can be limiting depending on who your team wants to reach. Simpli.fi offers custom targeting options to guarantee accuracy using unstructured data.

The platform also promotes cost and analytics transparency. If you want to see a detailed breakdown of where your ad dollars are going and how much of it goes toward platform fees, you can do that here.

Another standout feature in Simpli.fi is the localization capabilities, which uses geo-targeting to reach audiences in their pinpoint physical location.

Best for: Geo-targeting for highly specific location-based interests.

10. Adelphic, a Viant DSP

If customer support is important to your team, consider Adelphic (housed under Viant). This omnichannel DSP reports consistently having a client satisfaction rate above 95%.

Unlike other DSPS, the platform offers a flexible pricing model with a subscription-based structure. This means media buyers pay one set monthly fee for unlimited media.

Additional features include advanced reporting tools and data integrations, as well as recent collaborations with premiere companies to — according the partnership press release

— “offer advertisers a more refined and effective approach to targeting and measurement, particularly in the rapidly evolving landscape of CTV.”

Best for: Targeting multiple connected devices within a single household.

11. Amobee

Now a part of the data platform Nexxen (a unified DSP/SSP platform), Amobee lets you design digital campaigns across TV and digital.

This DSP identifies potential consumers on a person-by-person level using their proprietary identity graph called “Amobee ID.” Using this tool, brands can forecast their campaign’s performance across multiple devices and channels.

The platform can also access APIs from social channels, such as Facebook and Instagram, for social campaign automation.

Best for: Managing campaigns across TV, CTV, digital, and social media in a unified platform.

12. Basis by Centro

Basis has one of the largest inventories in the market and unites ad channels in a single interface.

Its artificial intelligence (AI) tool can also review over 30 campaign parameters and automatically analyze data using either algorithms or machine learning – your choice.

Basis also has scalable features, catering to both small and large businesses.

Best for: Streamlining campaigns with automated workflows.

13. Microsoft Invest (formerly Xandr)

This DSP specializes in reaching audiences through video advertising.

The platform is built on AT&T’s first-party data, giving brands unique insight to deploy targeted campaigns. Marketers can segment users by lifestyle, interest, intent, demographic, and viewership.

It also offers a sleek user interface to plan, launch, and track campaigns.

Best for: “Advanced targeting options, access to quality inventory, and a sophisticated campaign management solution,” advises Harris.

14. AdRoll

If your website has a shopping cart or a signup button, you’ll want to check out AdRoll. You probably know them as the leader in retargeting, helping over 140,000 brands over the past 15 years turn website visitors into customers.

But to meet the demand of ecommerce merchants, AdRoll has expanded their offering to enable brands to engage with both known and unknown contacts across display ads, social media ads, and email — the only platform to do so.

With the AdRoll HubSpot integration, you can even sync your HubSpot email lists directly from your account to AdRoll, matching your contacts to anonymous site visitors and creating targetable audiences.

AdRoll also has integrations with all of the big ecommerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and Wix, making it really easy to get campaigns up and running quickly by instantly pulling in your product feed to create dynamic ads and emails and help you identify high-value visitors to target.

Best for: “Retargeting and display ads services, specifically to help companies reach their target audience across millions of websites and social networks,” says Harris.

Jumping Into the World of Media Buying

When I started asking around about media buying, I had no idea of the vast world I was jumping into. What I thought was a simple question about how it’s done turned out to be… complicated.

Media buyers don’t just secure locations, times, and frequencies for ads — they’re also up on the latest marketing trends and AI technologies, along with having a deep understanding of their target audience.

But I also learned that even if you don’t have a dedicated staff for media buying, there are plenty of tools out there to take the guesswork out of ad placement.

Whether you’re a large outfit or an SMB, a multi-channel approach can ensure your brand’s ad gets in front of your ideal customer.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in February 2021 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Now that we are safely into 2025, let’s set off some more fireworks:

Most traditional lead generation methods are ineffective. 

Here’s why.

The B2B cosmos is filled with hundreds of thousands of competitors and choices. 

Prospects—battle-tested thanks to decades of shenanigans—are savvier. They can no longer be bothered by generic messaging or “opportunities” that seem too good to be true.

Thus, sourcing quality SQLs often feels like searching for a needle in a haystack. 

All of this to say, “Houston, we have a problem.” 

It’s Only Getting Harder to Engage Your Buyers 

The modern buying journey has evolved drastically in the last decade. 

Much of the complexity around B2B buying decisions comes from one word: More.

• More Stakeholders.
  It’s not atypical for a B2B buying committee to involve 6 to 10 stakeholders; each bringing unique perspectives, challenges, and requirements.
• More Content.
  Research from FocusVision suggests that B2B buyers consume an average of 13 pieces of content throughout their buying journey, from early awareness resources to in-depth decision-stage material.
• More Touchpoints.
  Before making a purchase decision, an individual buyer has an average of 25 interactions, spanning emails, meetings, content engagements, and more.

Not to mention how vendors have responded to these market needs. Just look at the complexity of the image below. How can anyone trust a lead generated through that mess?

This increasing complexity calls for a strategic approach that simplifies and aligns messaging, content, and timing to meet the needs of every stakeholder at each stage of the journey.

Of course, there is another result of this complexity: greater pressure on B2B marketers.

Under Pressure

In an era of “more, more, more,” marketers face the challenge of not just keeping up but finding ways to thrive under the weight of rising demands.

• Targets are rising.
  Each quarter brings higher expectations, pushing marketers to deliver more than ever before.
  
• Starving Sales teams.
  The pressure to provide qualified leads and actionable insights stems from the pressure placed squarely on the shoulders of our Sales colleagues. 
• You’re on the hook to deliver more.
  From generating demand to converting leads into revenue, the expectations for marketing teams have never been greater.

So, what’s the answer?

Why Programmatic Lead Generation is the Present and Future of B2B

There is an added benefit of anything rooted in programmatic: ease of use and scale.

Most of us, even non-marketers, are familiar with the term programmatic advertising.

If you’re unfamiliar with it, the Digital Marketing Institute describes programmatic advertising as the use of traffic data and online display targeting to deliver impressions at scale, offering marketers a smarter, more efficient way to boost ROI.

Programmatic is like a marketing autopilot—combining data, automation, and real-time optimization to ensure your message reaches the right audience at the perfect moment. 

It eliminates inefficiencies, scales precision, and delivers actionable insights, allowing marketers to work smarter while driving better results across every channel.

Programmatic Lead Generation accomplishes the same thing in the lead generation space.

One agreement, one vendor, effortless execution. (That applies to both programmatic advertising and lead generation.)

It’s a smarter, scalable way to generate leads that resonate with intent, making it easier for you to focus on what matters most—growing your pipeline and closing deals.

Users get things more relevant to them while clients appear in front of users more relevant to them. 

It’s a digital win-win.

What Sets Programmatic Lead Generation Apart?

Through one relationship with NetLine, you can gain access to 15k+ B2B Walled Gardens without the need to individually negotiate and/or manage those relationships.

Imagine your lead generation efforts not as a broad net but as a laser-focused beam. Programmatic Lead Generation allows you to connect with high-intent prospects based on their behavior, preferences, and readiness to engage—all at scale.

NetLine’s platform enables brands to customize lead criteria, tap into first-party data, and deliver content through trusted Tier 1 publishers. This means every lead is a real opportunity, not just another contact in your CRM.

Key Features That Elevate Your Strategy

1. Intent-Focused Targeting
   Forget about chasing unqualified leads.
   
   By leveraging first-party, buyer-level intent data, the platform ensures your content reaches prospects actively seeking solutions, significantly increasing your chances of conversion.
2. Automation That Works Smarter
   Automation isn’t just about speed; it’s about precision.
   
   NetLine’s real-time targeting matches the right content with the right audience, maximizing efficiency without sacrificing personalization.
3. Transparency You Can Trust
   Ever wonder if your campaigns are actually moving the needle?
   
   With real-time visibility into how leads engage with your content, NetLine provides the insights needed to refine your strategy and prove ROI.

Programmatic Lead Generation in Action

Programmatic Lead Generation identifies and aligns with your audience’s intent, ensuring you’re not just seen—you’re remembered.

Picture this: A CIO researching new cybersecurity tools downloads your white paper. With traditional lead generation, this interaction might end there. 

However, with NetLine’s programmatic approach, that initial action triggers a series of tailored follow-ups, moving the CIO closer to becoming a customer while providing insights into their journey.

This kind of dynamic engagement ensures you’re reaching your audience with the right message at every stage of their decision-making process.

Studying The Spectrum of Lead Generation

It’s also important to acknowledge that there exists a spectrum of lead generation. Naturally, this means that every lead is not generated equally.

In the same way that we would ask NASA about an alien spaceship coming to Earth, there are several questions to ask about your leads:

• Where did they come from?
• When did they arrive?
• What do they want?
• How do we know this?
• How do we respond?

In the table below, we’ve outlined three common sources of lead gen, highlighting strengths, weaknesses, and all the other variables that matter to revenue teams.

The Spectrum of Lead Generation

*Limited to participating publishers.

	B2B Publishers (Walled Gardens)	Programmatic Lead Generation	3rd Party Lead Gen (Scale Providers)	Display Advertising (Impression-Based)
Strengths	Engaged audiences- Rich user data- High-quality leads End-to-end visibility- Trusted experiences- Premium access	Full visibility of performance Trusted user experience Access to premium platforms	Broad-scale audience reach Diverse data sources- Off-the-shelf solutions	Wide content visibility High impression counts
					Weaknesses	Data accuracy challenges	Data accuracy issues- Cold, low-quality leads Outsourced processes- Limited audience relationships	Low lead specificity- No guaranteed lead generation Bot-inflated traffic- Ad fatigue
Lead Quality	High-quality leads filtered by detailed user intent and behaviors	Top-notch leads with clear user interest	Typically low, often with cold, generic prospects	Unfocused, traffic-focused with no assurance of lead conversion
Transparency	Full visibility into user interactions and content performance	Complete insights into user actions and content	Limited transparency on lead origin	Minimal insights beyond impressions and clicks
Audience Targeting	Native content distribution with contextual content alignment	Contextual alignment with user behavior and content comsuption	Rely on aggregated or third-party cookies for targeting	Account-only targeting; lacks deeper intent data
Data Collection	First-party data directly from audiences within trusted environments	First-party data from reliable sources	Third-party aggregated dataWeb scraping and bidstream data	Minimal engagement data
User Experience	Positive, trusted experiences aligned with content consumption habits	Seamless and trustworthy -Matches audience interests	Dependent on external processes; low trust with audiences	Noisy and intrusive; banner blindness reduces effectiveness
Cost Effectiveness	Pay only for leads that meet specific criteria (quality and intent-driven)	Pay only for engaged leads that meet filter criteria	Pay for lead volume regardless of quality	Pay per impression (CPM), not for actionable leads
Vendor Relationship Structure	Individual contracts with each media operator. Each contract will need to be individually negotiated and managed.	One vendor agreement	One agreement	One agreement
Brand Safety	Secure, premium environments with trusted content	High-security environments Reliable content sources	Risk of offshore outsourcing and data misuse	High exposure to spammy websites and off-topic ads

Working with NetLine means you can trust that your contact found your content on one of the most trusted sites across the web. 

NetLine’s programmatic lead generation will better align with your marketing strategy at scale, delivering exactly what your audience needs when they need it.

Will every lead be perfect? Of course not.

But leveraging our platform ensures you’ll have greater context around the Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How questions your Sales team will have.

Transform Your Pipeline with Programmatic Lead Generation

B2B lead generation is at a crossroads.

The old methods of throwing content at a wall to see what sticks won’t cut it anymore. Programmatic Lead Generation offers a new path forward—one where data, automation, and intent work together to drive measurable, meaningful results.

We’ve shown that the tools necessary to transform your lead generation strategy are already here. 

The only question left is this: Are you ready to leverage them?

What we know right now:

• TikTok will be banned this Sunday, January 19th if it doesn’t demonstrate a willingness to divest from ByteDance, it’s Chinese-owned parent company… Unless the Supreme Court agrees with TikTok that its previous ruling infringes on freedom of speech.
• The justices pushed back on TikTok’s stance that its ban infringes on freedom of speech, pointing out that a constitutional right doesn’t impact foreign-owned entities.
• The Supreme Court could rule as early as today.

It’s not looking like a happy-New-Year for TikTok.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments related to TikTok’s ban—and whether it infringes on the First Amendment right—on January 10, 2025, and could rule as early as today.

Here’s what you need to know about the status of the ruling, and what could happen if the ban takes effect.

But first… How’d we get here?

Ahem. Let’s start with some context: The “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” was signed into law in April 2024.

The name is a mouthful, but the ruling would prohibit U.S. app stores, as well as web-hosting services, from offering TikTok.

In other words: TikTok would be banned nationwide. (Cue despairing Gen Zers everywhere.)

So what does the Supreme Court want from TikTok?

For TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to divest its U.S. operations by, well, this Sunday (January 19th) — due to national security concerns over its Chinese ownership and data practices.

The Arguments: TikTok’s Side

During Friday’s oral arguments, TikTok’s attorney, Noel Francisco, argued that the ban violates the First Amendment.

As he puts it, “If the First Amendment means anything, it means the government cannot restrict speech in order to protect us from speech.”

He added, “The government has no valid interest in preventing foreign propaganda… The government’s real target, rather, is the speech itself, its fear that Americans, even if fully informed, could be persuaded by Chinese misinformation. That, however, is a decision that the First Amendment leaves to the people.”

Francisco concluded: “[The ban] is also grossly under-inclusive and ignores the most obvious less restrictive alternative: simply banning TikTok, Incorporated, from sharing any sensitive user data with anyone.”

Beyond TikTok’s argument that the ban violates freedom of speech, Francisco underlined a few other key points:

• One: They say there is no documented evidence of the Chinese government accessing user data.
• And two: The imposed timeframe is too tight for TikTok to feasibly separate from ByteDance.

The Rebuttals from the Supreme Court

On Friday, justices seemed skeptical of TikTok’s arguments and questioned how First Amendment rights are being implicated when the law specifically targets a foreign-owned company. (Touche).

As Chief Justice John Roberts put it: “Congress is fine with the [freedom of] expression. They’re not fine with a foreign adversary, as they’ve determined it is, gathering all this information about the 170 million people who use TikTok.”

In other words: The justices are fine with us embarrassing ourselves with TikTok dances, mastering the art of whipped coffee, and endlessly scrolling for that one ‘life-changing’ pasta recipe.

What they’re not fine with is the Chinese government peeking at our data while we do it.

Roberts continued to point out that Congress previously found ByteDance to be “subject to Chinese laws that require it to assist or cooperate with the Chinese government’s intelligence work.”

Justice Elena Kagan also drew a parallel to the concerns over the Soviet Union in the 20th century, stating: “If Congress had said, ‘Well, it’s very nice, we can have the Communist Party U.S.A, but it has to divest, it has to completely divorce itself from the Comintern and from any international ties that it has,’ do you think that that would have been absolutely fine?”

Can Trump undo the TikTok ban?

On Truth Social, Trump recently asked, “Why would I get rid of TikTok?” with a graphic displaying his 36 billion views of #trump and 24 million average views per post on @realdonaldtrump.

Many are of the mindset that Trump can undo the ban if it takes effect.

To my knowledge, here’s what he could do:

• He can pause the ban for 90 days if TikTok demonstrates that it is in the process of separating from ByteDance (though without actual evidence of its divestment, this could be challenged in court).
• Trump could declare TikTok is in compliance with the law, but this could still be challenged in Court if ByteDance doesn’t divest.
• He can try to negotiate a deal to sell TikTok to a U.S. company, but only if ByteDance is willing to sell—which, so far, it isn’t.

Beyond that, there isn’t much he can do if the Supreme Court doesn’t repeal the notion on its own.

What happens if TikTok is banned?

First off, it’s important to note that if the Supreme Court does rule to ban TikTok from app stores and web-hosting services, people can still continue to use TikTok if they already have it.

Although, without legitimate means of accessing the app, it would be impossible to access TikTok updates, which would eventually make the app unusable.

(And also, there’s the not-so-small problem of app updates typically being helpful for security measures. Without regular updates, your TikTok will become increasingly susceptible to hackers. Yikes.)

There are other ways to access the app, as well — for instance, a VPN (virtual private network), or changing your phone’s region so you can access the app as if you were in another country.

But these efforts are short-lived and risky. Eventually, the 170 million users who currently use TikTok will need to move to alternative platforms – especially since TikTok’s legal team has said if the ban takes effect, TikTok will “go dark”.

What does it all mean for marketers?

More than likely, the misplaced TikTokers will turn to Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts, which both mimic similar user behavior.

Additionally, if you leverage TikTok’s advertising tools, you would need to shift your ad strategy to YouTube or Instagram.

Short-form videos aren’t going away, but TikTok might. If that’s the case, it’s still critical your team focuses on how you can invest in short-term vids on other platforms.

And, while change can be scary, it’s important to remember – we’ll all be okay. 

As Leanne Elliott, co-host of the Truth, Lies and Work podcast, told me: “When it comes to platforms like TikTok, it’s important to remember that people and communities are far more resilient than the apps they use. Platforms come and go. Just think of MySpace, Vine, or even the way Facebook isn’t quite what it once was.”

She adds, “What stays constant is our need for connection and shared experiences. If TikTok disappears, creators and their audiences will move on together. The relationships don’t vanish, they just find a new home.”

Her bet is that, if TikTok were to disappear tomorrow, people would shift to YouTube Shorts, Instagram, and (drum roll, please…) LinkedIn. 

As Elliott points out, “[LinkedIn’s] crying out for fresh, creative content, especially for those looking to build a professional edge. Over the next few years, LinkedIn could become a real hot spot for B2B creators who get in now.”

It’s also important to remember that TikTok has never been a major lead-driver for most businesses. So, while it can be fun to hop aboard the ‘Tok trends, your business likely won’t suffer too greatly from the ban. 

As Louis ‘Fonzi’ Camejo, host of the Content is Profit podcast, told me: “I personally don’t mind the ban in terms of marketing. TikTok is not a channel that has added to our listenership so we haven’t invested time or resources in it. We noticed that even though some clips have good reach, there wasn’t too much interest from the user to move off platform.” 

We’ll update this post as more information comes our way but for now… We wait.

Content mills: the corner of the internet where everyone’s promised the moon, but most people are left in the dark.

Writers are offered an opportunity to be nurtured by editors, build their writing skills, and develop a professional portfolio. Companies are promised quality work that’s delivered quickly for a minimal investment.

I don’t think anyone comes out a winner in 90% of these arrangements. I know I lost when I wrote for a content mill ten years ago. Now with a freelance writing career and a book deal to my name, I see my time writing for content mills as a hazing period meant to induct me into the industry.

Do quality content mills exist? Theoretically, yes (though it‘s hard to find good reviews to back any single company up). Let’s examine content mills from the perspective of both the content mill writers and the companies looking to buy these articles. You’ll probably be surprised at what you find.

Table of Contents

• What are content mills?
• How Content Mills Work
• Content Mills You Might’ve Heard Of
• The Problem with Content Mills
• Content Mills: What to Do Instead

What are content mills?

Content mills, or content farms, are businesses that hire a large team of freelance writers and pay them generally low wages to produce an enormous amount of content for clients.

Businesses sometimes order hundreds of articles at once, and content quality varies greatly. The demand for content mills has decreased greatly with AI writing and marketing tools.

Content Mill vs. Content Marketing Agency

Content mills may sound similar to content marketing agencies, but there are key differences.

Payment

Writers are often paid very low wages by content mills because of the quantity-over-quality approach. Agencies tend to value writers and compensate them better and see writers as team members instead of simply a way to fill up their marketing calendar for the year.

Learning Opportunity

Content mills target inexperienced writers, tempting them with the dream of being paid to write and shaped by professional editors. I found my job listing on Craigslist and received no training. Agencies don’t want to churn and burn through their contractor and instead want to build long-term relationships.

Specialization

Agencies often specialize in a specific niche, allowing them to hire editors and freelancers who have expertise (or receive training) in the industry they’re writing about. Reputation is everything to these specialists, and the opportunity for industry specialization is enormous.

Here’s a real-world example: Kat Smith is the founder of several popular travel websites, as well as being the content manager at a digital marketing agency BuildUp Bookings that specializes in the vacation rental industry.

She manages a large team of freelance writers and editors. Based on her expertise in the travel industry, she’s developed a rigorous system for assigning articles and creating vacation content. Kat even shared that they cap writers at a specific number of articles per month to maintain the highest quality for clients.

This tailored, quality-first attitude is like night and day when compared to content mass production.

How Content Mills Work

So, how exactly does the content mill process work? Here’s an overview.

Writers join and wait for assignments.

After getting accepted by a content mill as a writer, you‘ll either get assigned articles by management, or you’ll have to bid and “win” article assignments from an internal job board.

Companies order articles.

Companies can order any type of writing from content mills, such as:

• Blog post with (most common).
• Product review.
• Product listing.
• Landing page.
• Copywriting.
• Fiction.

My last content mill assignment was writing product listings for car parts. I didn’t even own a car. I resigned after I submitted my final work.

Writers accept and process assignments.

Writers accept assignments from clients and have to complete them during a specific time period. Turnaround time is often quick, and instructions on assignments vary greatly. Payment is often lower in the beginning with the promise of a raise down the road.

Revision period.

Once the client receives the article, there’s a period where they can request revisions. The number of revisions available depends on the package that the client paid for; sometimes unlimited revisions are a part of client packages.

Receive payment.

Payment methods vary based on your agreement, but you should be paid within a specified period of having your content accepted by the client. The companies will sometimes take a percentage of your earnings. One of the below mills takes 30%.

Content Mills You Might’ve Heard Of

I don’t have any personal recommendations for content mills, so I asked ChatGPT what the most reputable mills were.

ChatGPT provided WriterAccess and Verblio, though I should mention that neither of these companies use the term “content mill” to describe themselves.

Source

I‘ve never worked with these companies directly, so I read dozens of reviews from both clients and writers. Here’s a summary of my findings.

WriterAccess

WriterAccess is a content marketing platform that connects businesses with a large pool of writers with diverse backgrounds.

The platform allows you to vet writers to find specialized freelancers like doctors and lawyers, which means it has the potential to generate unique and insightful content by experts, rather than a run-of-the-mill rehashing of what’s already out there.

While there’s a fair number of negative reviews out there, one independent publisher said that they were happy enough as a client to order 5,000+ articles. The timestamp on this review is dated for May 2022, before ChatGPT went public.

It’s worth noting that a common sentiment from writers in their reviews of content mills is that the number of assignments plummeted post-ChatGPT. WriterAccess boasts a team of 15,000 writers, but online forums say that the work has been declining in recent years. You can read reviews here:

• Reviews on G2
• Reviews on Glassdoor

Verblio

Verblio is a content platform that addresses the elephant in the room: AI content writing. They offer a specific AI content writing package, though other platforms offer similar services for free. You can use HubSpot’s free AI content writer instead.

Verblio clients can choose between AI content and 100 human-generated writing, and they can also find very specific sources such as PhDs and subject matter expertise to help with specific projects.

There are ample reviews available online, with one from an independent publisher citing the experience in detail, including screenshots citing dozens of errors missed by in-house editors. You can read reviews here:

• Reviews on G2
• Reviews on Glassdoor

The Problem with Content Mills

We‘ve spent the last thousand words together dancing around the dark side of the content mill industry — let’s not be coy and take a minute to look closely at the hard issues with this type of content.

Writers can be taken advantage of.

Muhammad Hamaz is a freelance writer who has penned many published articles. Most notably, his work has been published in Business Insider.

But he wrote that piece as a ghostwriter for the entrepreneur who was featured. Muhammad was only compensated $20, and someone else‘s name is on it. He’s not even listed as a co-author.

“The outsourcing culture has drowned us economically, especially writers from countries like Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan,” Muhammad shared, who’s located in Pakistan.

He shared that $500 per month is considered a high-paying wage for a full-time writer, and that SEO writers can get paid $800 maximum. For reference, an SEO writer in the US can be paid $800 for a single article.

“Outsourcing companies take advantage. There needs to be recognition of writers’ work.”

Companies that hire content mills need to verify how much the writers themselves are paid if they want to outsource ethically. The money paid to the mill says nothing about how much they’re paying writers.

Readers value first-hand experience.

Mills promise a stream of constant content. Unless you vet writers very well for expertise that matches up with your industry, you‘ll end up publishing content by writers who are just going to read what’s on Google and then regurgitate it.

When you pay writers almost nothing, you can‘t expect original reporting. Writers are instructed to read what’s already online and turn that into an original (enough) article.

Given that the internet is full of mistakes, bot content, and outdated information, this sets the bar very low.

The internet doesn’t need more product reviews being written by people who have never tested the product (read a shocking deep-dive on this here).

Readers want first-hand experience; it’s why so many people add “reddit” to the end of their Google query. The pursuit of authentic experience is changing the way the public engages with search engines.

Google wants authoritative articles, too.

Google likes authoritative writing so much that it developed the EEAT guidance:

1. Experience.
2. Expertise.
3. Authoritativeness.
4. Trustworthiness.

If your content doesn‘t check any of these boxes, then what’s the point of it? You might fill up your site with thousands of words, but it‘s incredibly hard to verify the content that you’re publishing.

There are too many loopholes.

If your company is hiring a content mill, how can you guarantee that the articles are original and not stolen? Those who think they can easily detect plagiarized content writing are not aware of the power of the free tools on the market.

To test this, I found an article from the Mayo Clinic on high blood pressure and wanted to see how long it would take someone to rip it off. Using free tools, I was able to get it to pass a plagiarism and AI scan in less than five minutes.

First, I prompted ChatGPT to rewrite the entire medical article from the Mayo Clinic:

Source

Then I tested the article in a plagiarism detector. It failed the first few scans, despite me prompting ChatGPT to rewrite it.

I then abandoned ChatGPT and opened a free plagiarism rewriter and asked it to rewrite ChatGPT’s article. On its first attempt at rewriting the article, it achieved a 0% plagiarized scan:

Source

Then, I ran the article through CopyLeaks to see if it was AI-generated. CopyLeaks reported that, indeed, this entire article was AI, so I ran it through a text humanizer.

With only one attempt using a free AI-to-human text tool, I was able to get this article to pass a CopyLeaks scan:

Source

This is important: Ethical writers would never steal content, but many content mills are not ethical companies. During my time writing for a content mill, I was encouraged by editors to paraphrase and take ideas from articles that I found online. It’s why my tenure there was so brief.

Content Writing and AI

Lying or sloppily using AI is unnecessary when the freelance marketplace is full of incredible writers with whom you can build relationships.

I‘m asked frequently (too frequently) what I think of AI as a freelance writer. It’s too big of a question to address here, but I will share a few statistics from our State of Marketing trends report that show that AI isn’t here to replace professional writers:

• 95% of marketers who use generative AI to generate copy have to edit the text, with 44% reporting they make significant changes.
• 60% of marketers share the concern that AI can harm their brand’s reputation through plagiarism, bias, or misalignment with brand values.
• Thankfully, only 6% of marketers say they use AI to produce an entire piece of content for them.

The originality of writing is hard to gauge, and even established publications are getting caught red-handed using AI articles written by fake personas. Read about Sports Illustrated for a shocking exposé. Or Microsoft. Or any of these.

It makes sense to leverage AI in marketing, but those who are careless will pay the price.

Everyone’s promised the moon.

Large promises are made by content mills, spanning:

• Raises in cents per word.
• Overall earning potential.
• Article quality.
• Optimization.
• Training.

Both companies and writers need to be critical of these promises.

Here‘s an example from my experience. The content mill I worked for sold companies search-engine-optimized website articles, but the only SEO guidance that I received was this: use a keyword 5x per article. This company could’ve offered real training or directed writers to free trainings offered online.

As a writer, I needed real training. I had very little professional writing experience. I didn’t know anything about SEO and relied on the guidance I was given.

Looking back, I think that the editors genuinely knew about SEO. If they had spent one hour taking the free SEO training in HubSpot Academy, they would’ve learned more than they taught their writers.

To paraphrase a one-star review left on Indeed for a content mill: “They chew up and spit out writers like it’s nothing, and not for lack of talent, but because the editorial team doesn’t understand what they’re doing. Writers are set up to fail from the start.”

Writers don’t benefit enough.

Freelance writers leave writing gigs with more than one type of payment. They’re financially compensated, of course, but they also count on things like:

• LinkedIn recommendations.
• Authority building.
• Portfolio growth.
• Skill building.
• Referrals.

With the content mill as the middleman between writers and the publications publishing their work, freelance writers are unable to build lasting relationships with their clients.

The lack of ownership isn‘t an accident. It’s a part of some content mills’ contracts with freelance writers requiring writers to use an alias for “privacy” so that clients cannot find them online and seek them out independently of the company.

Content Mills: What to Do Instead

There’s been a lot of talk about what not to do with content outsourcing. So, where should you focus?

Develop a content strategy.

How many high-value blog posts can you publish per month? Answering that question will set the stage for your editorial calendar and strategy. We can walk you through every single step of this process:

• Use our free template to build your calendar right away.
• Learn how to develop content workflows to keep your team organized and efficient.
• Use content intelligence to gauge your content’s success.
• Try our content marketing software to help you generate content and scale your strategy.

Quality over quantity.

Quality content that serves your audience and nurtures leads takes time to develop. Focus on making content that your customers and industry actually need. It will bring you closer to your target audience and help you understand your own product and business better.

This takes time.

Wirecutter famously spends 20 to 200 hours writing new guides. I recently started a new niche website on a Portuguese pilgrim trail, and I‘ve written more than 35,000 words trying to build traffic from the ground up.

I could buy a bunch of $10 blog posts written by people who had never even been to Portugal, but what’s the point?

You don’t tap into the benefits of content marketing when you do it poorly.

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Position yourself as a leader.

Great content doesn’t contribute to the noise; it leads and positions you as a subject matter expert. Both freelance writers and companies looking to produce more content can prioritize this with:

1. Ongoing education.
2. Original reporting.
3. Networking.

Not only will this EEAT-ify your content for Google, but it will also inevitably make your content more valuable for readers. For an example of incredible leadership through content creation, look at the level of dedication that HouseFresh has brought to its readership.

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Invest in writers.

“We feel like you know our business better than we do.” A client told me over lunch when we finally met in real-life after I’d been working remotely as their content manager for two years. This is the result of long-term relationships with freelancers instead of churn-and-burn outsourcing.

Connect with writers directly. Find us on LinkedIn or platforms like UpWork. Ask for a direct writer referral from your industry connections. List your freelance position on job boards, and let us come to you.

While experienced writers are ready to hit the ground running, consider giving a less-experienced freelancer a chance and training them. Start with a paid freelance writing trial period and train them. Pay fairly and invest, and you’ll see the results.

While it’s not specific to the writing industry, this post summarizes the value of hiring someone without experience beautifully:

Content Mills Won’t Drive Meaningful Interaction

While I’m no stranger to content mills, I was shocked while researching to see the hundreds of negative experiences detailed online.

Some freelancers will manage to find content mill jobs that help them develop their writing skills and build their portfolios, but those outcomes are not the norm. There are better freelance writing jobs that offer reliable income and real professional growth.

I hope that these insights can help humanize the freelance writing industry to companies looking for content. We deserve better than what content mills can offer; so do you.

I remember when I first heard of public relations. It was a long time ago, and I thought it was a fancy name for a special kind of marketing. I later discovered the true meaning when I became a content marketer.

While I’m not a guru yet, I’ve learned a lot and can tell you this: public relations walks a tightrope between creativity, persuasion, and strategy. So, if you want to expose your business to new people, build trust with the public, improve your reputation, or even manage a business crisis, you need public relations.

According to the PR Global Market Report 2024, the public relations market will grow from $106.93 billion in 2023 to $114.1 billion in 2024, and is expected to reach $144.28 billion by 2028.

In this comprehensive guide, I’m going to share everything I’ve learned about public relations, plus some key insights I got from experts. I’ll also cover what a public relations strategy is and how to build one.

What is public relations?

Public relations (PR) is the practice of using media channels to promote your organization and cultivate a positive public perception. PR is also the process of managing your organization’s brand and communications — especially in times of crisis.

Here’s what I also discovered: PR is how brands manage the spread of their information, so it’s similar to branding. The main difference is that PR focuses on communication and reputation, while branding relies on visual elements like logos, websites, and marketing materials.

According to James Hacking, founder and chief playmaker of Socially Powerful, “Public relations is about shaping how people perceive your brand. It’s about media coverage that aims to build trust and credibility while ensuring your brand’s message resonates with the right audience.

“In a fast-paced digital world, PR is critical for maintaining a strong reputation and staying relevant amidst constant scrutiny.”

Why is public relations important?

Public relations defines how a company communicates with people — customers, partners, journalists, philanthropists, politicians, and the general public. As far as I’m concerned, all businesses need public relations, regardless of their size or industry.

“I see PR as the ‘conscience’ of an organization,” says Gauri Manglik, CEO & co-founder of Instrumentl.

“It helps leaders make wise decisions that serve the interests of both the company and the community. PR keeps us tuned into what people are thinking and feeling. It’s that critical outside perspective — the voice of the customer, if you will,” she continues.

In a global survey to find the most trusted sources of news and information in late 2023, 62% of adults said they trusted traditional media, while 68% said they trusted search engines. Interestingly, social media was the source considered to be the least trustworthy.

Public relations professionals are expert storytellers. They find strategies for how to get your story out in front of the people you want to see it, in media outlets that build trust.

Why? Because nowadays, customers want to trust the brands they do business with — and nothing builds and fosters trust like public relations.

Manglik confirms this, saying that “without thoughtful PR, organizations can easily lose touch and make missteps that damage their reputations. I‘ve learned this lesson the hard way more than once in my career. But when PR is done right, it builds tremendous goodwill and loyalty among stakeholders. That’s an invaluable asset in today’s skeptical world.”

One thing I noticed is that a public relations strategy may cover a full year of campaigns or address a single goal, like a product launch. Also, developing an authentic PR strategy requires a collaborative approach to communication.

Sharing a point of view about climate change, diversity, equity, and inclusion is no longer optional for brands. I also learned that internal and employee communications play a more important role.

In 2024, 70% of PR professionals brief their leadership on measurement and reporting once a month or more, while 44% plan to spend more time on internal communications.

And according to the 2024 Global Comms Report, 92% of communications leaders agree that the C-suite has sought comms’ counsel more in the past 12 months than in previous years.

I believe all these figures speak to the increasing importance of PR in business operations and brand perception. It can be easy to jump on one-time opportunities for media attention, but if you want to know how to do PR right, start with a public relations strategy.

Louis Meyer is the marketing and creative director at RX Communications, a boutique medical communications agency.

“In my years of experience in the field of public relations, I‘ve learned that the key to building a successful PR strategy lies in a combination of dos and don’ts,” says Meyer.

Those guidelines look like this:

• Do focus on establishing strong relationships with key stakeholders, including media outlets and influencers.
• Don’t underestimate the power of transparency and authenticity. In today’s digital age, always communicate honestly and openly.
• Do stay agile and adaptable in your approach. The PR landscape is constantly evolving.
• Don’t forget the importance of measurement and analytics.

How to Build a PR Strategy

1. Research internal and external brand factors.

I’d recommend starting with what has gone well in the past for your business, and what efforts didn’t work out. This could include:

• Tracking media mentions.
• Reviewing influencer relationships and results.
• Evaluating social media engagement and traffic KPIs.
• Review buyer personas and customer insights.

Next, I’d do some competitive analysis to figure out what is working best for other businesses in your industry. I learned that social listening tools can help speed up this process.

As you close out your research, list any internal or external factors that could have had an impact on your brand. These might include:

• Feature, product, or pricing changes
• Distribution shifts
• Stakeholders and leadership changes
• Employee sentiment
• Legal factors
• Political climate
• Economic shifts
• Trends
• Tech advances

2. Outline your goals.

It can be tempting to jump on tactics you notice during research, but first, I’d suggest you decide on goals. Whether you’re addressing a local crisis or planning a year of public relations image-building, this step is critical.

Even a short outline of goals can steer you and your team toward the right tactics.

“A PR strategy is an integrated communication plan combining online and offline tactics to achieve specific goals,” says Edward White, head of growth at beehiiv.

“Online tactics might include influencer collaborations, while offline approaches might involve events or sponsorships. This dual approach ensures your PR efforts reach audiences wherever they are. A strong strategy ties all actions back to measurable objectives, ensuring alignment with your business goals.”

Here are a few things I discovered that every PR plan should include.

• First, decide who your target audience is for each campaign.
• Next, choose the key messages you want to communicate to that audience.
• Finally, don’t forget to include the metrics you plan to track. Analytics tracking should be part of the campaign set-up, not something you add on after a campaign launches.

Pro tip: Forming a strong foundation for your public relations will better enable your success than one-off efforts. I’d also recommend trying to make each goal a SMART goal. This PR plan template can help you make sure that your strategy covers your key messaging and other goals.

3. Create a timeline for your PR campaigns.

Public relations success relies on the right message at the right time. So, create a clear calendar for both short and long-term initiatives.

Be sure to note public holidays and important industry dates. For example, the end of November is an important time of year for most ecommerce businesses.

4. Select the right public relations tactics.

Once you know when and why, it’s time to nail down which tactics will be the best to deliver on your strategy. Later on in this post, I’ll cover some common PR strategies and tactics. It might also help to look at some PR examples for inspiration.

5. Track your results.

Once you decide on tactics, next I want you to focus on how you will measure outcomes. Public relations isn’t an exact science, and measuring perception can be tricky.

Whenever possible, align your PR metrics with business goals. This can help you draw a clear connection between public relations efforts and ROI.

Here’s what Mushfiq Sarker, CEO of LaGrande Marketing says:

“A big no-no in a PR strategy is disregarding analytics. Ignoring data removes any clarity on what’s effective and what might need improvement. Analytics provide important information about the performance of your efforts, showing where resources should be focused. Metrics such as engagement rates, website traffic, and click-through rates will tell you what resonates most with your audience.”

Sarker also points out that “using this information allows you to make adjustments, optimize your efforts, and maximize the impact of your campaigns. Without analytics, you risk wasting time and resources on strategies that don’t deliver results.”

An important note: A public relations manager often guides strategy around earned media, but they can be more effective with a multichannel strategy, connecting the right topic to the right audience.

Brands manage their PR — or communication and reputation — through various media channels. A great public relations strategy usually includes three types of media.

Media: Owned vs. Paid vs. Earned

The types of public relations, which I’ll review shortly, fall into three main categories: owned, paid, and earned media.

Each type works towards the same goal of building a positive brand reputation, but they use different strategies to get there.

I’d suggest your PR strategies include all three, as they all provide different ways of reaching, engaging, and building trust with your audience.

Owned Media

Owned media is any content that your business controls. It’s often the go-to strategy for businesses looking to build a PR campaign.

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Rightly so, as it’s arguably the most important type of PR-related media that you should be focusing on. This is because you have total control — unlike the other two media tactics.

Owned media includes:

• Social media posts
• Blog content
• Website copy
• Email newsletters

Owned media acts as a “home base” for your PR activity. When people write about your brand or products, they’ll likely reference (i.e., link to) your owned media in their coverage.

Paid Media

It’s not uncommon to pay to promote your content in the marketing world, and it’s no different when it comes to PR.

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Paid media refers to paying to make your content visible. It’s standard practice to promote owned media.

Paid media includes:

• Social media advertising
• Influencer marketing
• Pay-per-click (PPC)

Putting some funds toward boosting PR content is becoming increasingly popular.

Since the majority of social platforms are reducing organic reach for business accounts, paid media is a fantastic way to make sure your content gets in front of the people you want to see it.

Earned Media

Earned media is the tactic used to boost conversation around your brand. I found out that it’s essentially word-of-mouth and is arguably the best PR tactic to build your reputation.

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Earned media is the hardest type of PR media to obtain. It takes a lot of effort, consistency, and hard work to establish it — that’s why it’s “earned.”

Earned media includes:

• Mentions in industry news and reviews
• Praise from customers on social media
• High rankings on search engines

All of these media avenues provide ways to use PR to build brand awareness, generate leads, and convert those leads into paying customers — similar to your marketing.

Next, I’m going to discuss the difference.

Unlike marketing, PR doesn’t always have an impact on sales. It typically indirectly promotes your products or services through activities like press release distribution and speaking at industry events.

Alternatively, instead of improving the perception of your business, marketing campaigns focus on driving revenue and boosting profits.

“If a marketing strategy deals with the introduction and sales of goods in the market, then the public relations strategy oversees the company’s overall image, protects and builds its credibility, and helps to develop the brand long-term,” explains Brandon Schroth, founder of Reporter Outreach, a digital PR agency.

I also learned that people don’t buy products, they buy brands.

For this reason, using PR and marketing in tandem drives the best results: typically, someone connects with your brand as a result of your PR efforts and converts into a customer as a result of your marketing tactics.

Next, I’m going to discuss the types of PR you can use as you promote your organization and build and manage your reputation.

1. Business Events

Business events are opportunities to market your products or services and gain exposure for your brand.

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Whether hosted or attended by your company, I love that events are also important sales opportunities. Events give you a chance to meet prospective customers and delight current ones face-to-face.

Speaking engagements at events are also helpful for boosting brand awareness and sharing unique thought leadership or data-driven information that can help elevate your brand.

2. Community Relations

Community relations refers to building positive relationships with the local community around your business.

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This could include charity work, donations, special discounts, or anything that builds a strong relationship with the community and strengthens customer loyalty.

3. Corporate and Social Responsibility

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Corporate and social responsibility is similar to community relations, but I found out that it places a greater emphasis on ethical business practices, environmental responsibility, and philanthropy — locally, regionally, and globally.

This is a critical area of PR as it directly affects the public perception of your brand.

4. Crisis Management

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Crisis management is the practice of acknowledging, managing, and working to reverse negative communication and perception surrounding a business crisis. PR usually handles anything that could jeopardize or ruin your brand’s reputation.

Crisis management is an important function of PR and should be handled quickly, consistently, and strategically. With certain PR tools, you can avert crises by monitoring online chatter and quality-checking any marketing or promotional material that may be misunderstood or misconstrued.

Free resource: Manage, plan for, and communicate during your corporate crises with this free crisis management communication kit.

5. Cyber Threat Intelligence

In 2023, only 46% of U.S. businesses have an active plan for threat intelligence. But cyber security is in the top five global risks in the World Economic Forum’s 2024 Risk Report.

Besides the financial challenges that cyberattacks create, I also discovered that there is a perception challenge. This can be devastating to a brand’s reputation if it’s not handled skillfully.

These issues will call on PR’s crisis management expertise. It’s also a good idea to build relationships with tech experts and thought leaders in the industry. This can give you the expertise you need to limit the reputation impact of these increasingly frequent attacks.

6. Employee Relations

Employee relations, also known as internal PR, is the practice of communicating with and cultivating a positive employee perception of your company.

This process may include dedicated employee newsletters or communications, employee perks and benefits, free training and skill-boosting opportunities, employee appreciation events, and working with unions or employee groups.

I found out that employee relations not only keeps your employees motivated, hard-working, and loyal, but also encourages them to advocate for your business — which can bring in both customers and more high-quality employees.

7. Influencer relations

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Another thing I discovered is that influencers play a powerful role in PR and marketing. According to Statista, the influencer market was worth 21.1 billion in 2023, more than triple its value in 2019. And is estimated to reach a record 24 billion in 2024.

I also noticed that in many businesses, the public relations team also manages influencer relationships. But sometimes marketing, social media, and PR teams share these responsibilities. It will take hard work and experience to creatively collaborate with each influencer to make sure your brand gets the results it wants from its authority.

Side quest: Check out this post to learn of the top channels for influencer marketing in 2024.

8. Media Relations

Media relations refers to building positive relationships with journalists, publications, and other news outlets.

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This process typically includes writing press releases, organizing press releases, and scheduling interviews. Not only does this gain exposure for your business and products, but it also encourages the media to market your brand for free.

Free resource: Download our free inbound press release kit to access step-by-step templates to build press releases and a promotion plan.

9. Social Media Marketing

Social media can be both an earned and paid PR tactic.

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For most companies, social media can be a helpful PR (and marketing) tool. It’s an effective way to amass followers, convert customers, share your content, and resolve crises.

Whether you’re sharing a post with your audience or interacting with a single customer, your social media activity is open to the public.

That’s why it’s critical to have a social media strategy that keeps your communications consistent, positive, and accurate.

Next, I’m going to talk about the person who’s responsible for these different types of PR: your public relations manager.

What does a public relations manager do?

PR managers are responsible for building, executing, and monitoring your PR strategies and tactics. They typically handle crisis communications, write press releases, and lead a team of other PR professionals who manage your brand’s public presence.

I also learned that you can hire a public relations manager to handle PR for your business, or work with a PR Agency.

At this point, I’d like to highlight the skills and tasks your public relations manager will know inside out.

PR Manager Skills

Successful public relations managers have a particular set of skills. Besides being flexible and open to change, here are some of the most important skills that I discovered.

Great Communication

One primary focus of public relations is building your business’s reputation. To do this, public relations managers spend a lot of their time building and sustaining relationships.

Besides speaking about your company at public functions, press conferences, and other events, your public relations team is also connecting with reporters, influencers, and other stakeholders.

For this reason, excellent communication is a key skill for PR managers.

Writing Skills

Public relations managers should also be able to communicate well in written form.

Since PR managers are responsible for writing press releases and company-related news, strong writing skills will help convey the right message to promote your company. This is especially useful for online PR where you’ll need to create blog posts, website content, and press releases to gain coverage.

Creativity

Like marketing, creativity goes a long way in the public relations world. Great PR managers are creative and know how to create a strategy that stands out from the crowd, which is important because a unique story or perspective will drive PR coverage.

Strong Research Skills

Public relations is a social industry, and people might be talking about your brand without directly mentioning it. Good research skills will help public relations managers find and use these opportunities.

A public relations manager must stay up on trends and digital marketing updates. PR professionals can’t operate in a bubble and must stay aware of search and social media changes for their strategies to succeed.

They offer expert knowledge and a fresh perspective to maintain a presence in competitive media outlets.

Manglik points out that, “A PR plan is a living document that must adapt as circumstances evolve. I constantly monitor outcomes to determine what‘s working and what’s not, and adjust approaches accordingly.

My role is to leverage communications in a way that builds brand equity, garners support, and advances organizational success. An agile, insight-driven strategy is crucial to making that happen.”

Public relations managers will also need to do research when planning a PR strategy. Because they might need additional information, statistics, and data points to boost the power of their owned media, strong research skills are essential.

PR Manager Tasks

The day-to-day tasks of your PR manager can vary depending on your industry, active PR campaigns, PR team size, and other factors. However, here’s what I learned they often include:

• Writing press releases to announce company-related news.
• Creating fact sheets and media kits about the company to send to media teams for brand-building.
• Giving media training to both in-house and external teams.
• Attending and speaking at industry events and representing the brand at trade shows, recruiting events, etc.
• Finding and analyzing media coverage and promoting that content through owned and paid media channels.

Public relations managers are also responsible for tracking and measuring their PR efforts. The following key performance indicators (KPIs) can help your public relations manager analyze and improve your PR strategies.

Clear measurable goals are the only way to ensure that your PR strategy is effective. In a business world that is increasingly focused on data-driven outcomes, I found out that the KPIs you track can make or break your public relations programming.

Most PR metrics gauge perception, so it can be difficult to connect company wins directly to public relations campaigns. For this reason, you should select a range of KPIs that align directly with your business goals.

For example, let’s say your business wants to improve brand awareness. KPIs like increased share of voice, and website traffic, alongside recent brand mentions, can show a more direct connection between PR efforts and business goals.

Next, I’m going to discuss KPIs that will help you track your PR efforts and determine the effectiveness of your PR strategy.

1. Media Coverage and Brand Mentions

Brand mentions occur when someone mentions your brand. Media coverage tracks the number of earned media stories that went live. These metrics are important because they help you measure awareness of your brand and its stories.

You might see brand mentions in traditional news coverage, on other business or personal blogs, in reviews, or on social media.

Some media outlets may tag or hyperlink their sources. Others may not link back to your brand or website, which means you have to go looking for them. Check out the PR tools section below for some helpful software tools.

Note: It’s important to read brand mentions and media coverage for context. Remember, you want people to be saying good things about your brand, and it’s not always easy to understand the value of coverage until you read the entire piece.

2. Share of Voice

This is an essential KPI for PR. Share of voice measures competitive brand awareness. This metric helps your business understand the scale of customers in your industry and where your brand fits within it.

It also tracks your brand reputation.

3. Pitch Interactions

Pitches are another important metric for PR. It can sometimes take longer than expected for a piece to go live. So, track the number of pitches you send and reply to. You’ll also want to track how many email opens and clicks you get from a pitch.

These PR metrics can help you create a funnel for earned media mentions.

This can help you better understand which efforts are pulling in the most value, as well as the best ways to scale your strategy.

4. Sentiment

Sentiment, which is a synonym for viewpoint or opinion, measures the attitudes in brand mentions. While brand mentions and backlinks typically improve your brand awareness and SEO, sentiment is what sets apart the positive mentions from the negative ones.

You’ve probably heard the saying, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” Whether you agree or disagree, it is good practice to be aware of negative press.

Here’s what Sarker says about this: “What I always make sure to do in my PR strategy is monitor public perception. This involves consistently tracking how our audience feels about our brand and reviewing media coverage to identify any shifts in sentiment. Public perception can change rapidly, and understanding those changes allows us to adapt before small concerns escalate into larger issues.”

There are a lot of great tools that can help you do this, which I’ll go into below. Sarker, in particular, points out how “Google Alerts and social media listening platforms help in identifying mentions of our brand and services, providing real-time insights into how we’re being perceived.”

Tracking sentiment can help you understand what your audience is saying about your brand and whether or not you need to address any problems or concerns.

5. Social Media Engagement

Social media engagement encompasses a few types of activity: views, impressions, likes, shares, and comments.

This information shows the level of brand awareness and engagement among your audience members. It also tells you when your audience is most active, i.e., when you should be posting and interacting with your followers.

6. Social Shares

I also learned that social shares are different from social media engagement. Social shares refer to when your audience shares something from your website or blog on their social media.

This is a critical metric because it tells you that your audience enjoys your content enough to vouch for it on their social channels. It’s a very clear measure of your brand reputation among your audience.

When looking at social shares, pay attention to what types of content people share most frequently. This will give you an idea of what your audience enjoys the most and what kind of content to create more of.

7. Site Traffic

Site traffic is a sign of successful PR efforts. If people are hearing about your brand through earned media and heading to your site, your PR efforts are reaching your audience.

As you run PR campaigns, track your site traffic once press releases and other efforts go live. I’d recommend you use your site analytics to check your visitors’ referral sources (how they made their way to your website) and aim to replicate this in the future.

8. SEO Metrics

There are a few SEO metrics that can also help you with PR measurement.

Domain Authority

Domain authority refers to your website’s SEO ranking and how it performs in search results.

It’s ranked from 1 to 100 (with 100 being the highest) and is a valuable measure of how your website compares to your competitors. The higher your domain authority is, the better your website will rank in search results.

Domain authority is made up of three main factors:

1. Links to your site (backlinks)
2. Links from your site to other well-ranked websites
3. The age of your site.

While you can’t magically make your website older, you can use PR to attract backlinks and place links in your content.

Check it out: Moz offers a free tool to check your domain authority, page rank, and other important website measures.

Backlinks

Backlinks help you find brand mentions. With backlinks, sites that have mentioned your brand have linked to your website, making it easy for readers to click through and visit your website.

And it’s not just new traffic you’ll benefit from when collecting backlinks — you could see a rise in your SEO rankings, too.

9. Conversions

While the volume of new customers coming directly from your PR activity isn’t easy to measure, it’s definitely worth investigating.

You can discover where your customers came from by either surveying customers after they purchase and asking how they heard of you, or by using a tool like Google Analytics to learn about your customers’ conversion paths (aka their route to purchase).

Note: While this is an exciting metric to track, don’t feel disheartened if you don’t see an influx of conversion-ready site traffic. Remember, the goal of public relations is to raise brand awareness, spread the ideas of your internal thought leaders, and communicate the ideas of your brand. Those new site visitors could always return and make a purchase in the future now that they know about your brand because of your PR.

10. Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE)

AVE equals what it would cost to buy the space for an earned media placement if it was an ad.

At one point this was the only KPI for public relations, but many industry professionals feel that this is an outdated KPI and an inaccurate way to measure PR. Depending on your business, it’s okay if you still want to track this KPI.

Next, I’m going to review a handful of PR SaaS tools that can help you implement your PR strategies and track these KPIs.

Public Relations Tools

To help you hit the ground running, I’ve rounded up a handful of PR tools that you can use to execute your public relations campaigns and measure your impact and performance.

1. Brand24

Brand24 helps you monitor online mentions about your brand, product, or service, and measure the results of your PR campaigns. Slack integrations and a notifications system will help you react in time to prevent a PR crisis.

2. Agility PR Solutions

Agility PR Solutions is a paid tool that provides powerful yet easy-to-use solutions for your media database, monitoring, and analytics. These solutions help identify and connect with influencers, capture coverage, and measure impact.

3. Anewstip

Anewstip is a media search, monitoring, and relationship management tool. You can use it to search media mentions by keyword or handle, reach out to journalists and influencers all over the world, and create a media database of important PR campaign contacts. It offers both paid and free plan options.

4. CoverageBook

CoverageBook is a paid tool that helps you find and collect any coverage of your PR content. It’s a great tool for PR agencies who are building coverage reports for their clients.

5. Meltwater

Meltwater is a paid PR and social media monitoring tool with lots of features, such as real-time tracking, advanced Boolean search queries, unified inbox and much more. It’s ideal for businesses of all types and sizes.

6. Flaunter

Flaunter is a digital press center and showroom that provides a platform for brands to showcase their digital assets, products and sample collections. With 24/7 access for media, influencers, bloggers and stylists, Flaunter makes it easier for brands to gain exposure, editorial coverage and brand awareness.

By streamlining PR efforts, Flaunter helps brands to grow their audience, attract new customers and ultimately expand their business.

7. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is an easy-to-use, free tool that allows you to set up email alerts for certain keyword mentions. When a name, keyword, or link is mentioned online, Google sends you a digest email alerting you of the mention.

8. Mention

Mention helps you track who’s mentioned your brand in media and on social media. You can also use this tool to publish on your social media and manage crisis communications. It offers both free and paid plan options.

9. Monitor Backlinks

Monitor Backlinks is a free tool that helps you track who’s mentioned your brand in coverage and added a backlink to your site. It’s also valuable for monitoring and disavowing bad backlinks and keeping your website’s SEO and domain authority at their peak.

10. Muck Rack

Muck Rack is a paid tool that allows you to discover and contact members of the media who might want to cover your PR story.

11. PR Fire

PR Fire is a paid tool that helps you distribute your press release to journalists and receive a report of their performance and reach. It’s ideal for in-house teams who are doing their own PR.

12. SharedCount

SharedCount shows you engagement data for any social media, blog, or website URL. Once you input a URL, the tool will tally its likes, shares, comments, and other engagement measures. It offers both free and paid plan options.

Looking for more? These are just a few useful PR tools that I found. If you don’t see what you’re looking for here, here are more great PR tools to consider.

Start Building Your Public Relations Strategy

Whether you want to increase brand awareness, launch a new product, or build trust, I highly recommend you start by building a public relations strategy.

With all the tactics, tools, and expert tips I’ve shared above, you can hit the ground running and create a brand-new PR strategy or improve your current one.

As you dig in, remember that public relations is an ongoing, iterative strategy — not a one-off task. And, like marketing, it can take a while to see results. But with a solid strategy and a commitment to spreading the word about your company, you’ll soon see more mentions, backlinks, and general buzz.

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

I was a teacher during the pandemic, which meant I had to become a pro at creating explainer videos — fast. If I could have gotten away with it, I would have hired someone to make my videos.

That was out of the question as a teacher with a limited (okay, non-existent) class budget. However, I’ve been wondering: How much does an explainer video actually cost?

In marketing, you juggle various tasks throughout the day — from tracking social media campaigns to planning lead magnets to creating engaging explainer videos. It can be a lot, which is why outsourcing your tasks, especially video creation, is popular.

In this post, I’m digging into the numbers to find out the cost of an explainer video. This way, you can better plan your marketing budget, and hopefully, it will save you and your team time!

Table of Contents

• What is an explainer video?
• How to Make an Explainer Video
• How long does it take to make an explainer video?
• How much do explainer videos cost?
• How much should I expect to pay for my explainer video?

What is an explainer video?

Before we discuss the cost of an explainer video, let’s define it. An explainer video is a short clip that walks viewers through a topic. Typically, brands use explainer videos to show how their product or service works and why it’s a beneficial resource for their audience.

Video is an excellent tool to bring awareness to your brand. An impressive 62% of consumers watch video content, like unboxing, promos, or reviews, to learn more about a company.

Here’s a great example of an explainer video:

Creating short explainer videos can help your audience understand how your product or service can solve their specific pain points.

I mention “short” for a reason. The way audiences consume video is changing. In the early days of YouTube, longer video content was popular. However, with the rise of TikTok and YouTube Shorts, audiences tend to prefer short-form content.

The average human attention span is shorter than a goldfish, clocking in at just 8.25 seconds. This is why 83% of marketers suggest video content should be under 60 seconds. Anything longer, you risk losing your audience. Plus, 71% of marketers say shorter videos have a higher ROI.

So, it’s safe to say that adding short explainer videos to your content rotation is a good idea.

How to Make an Explainer Video

During the pandemic, I learned that to keep my students’ attention, I needed to create short, engaging explainer videos. That meant drilling down and sharing only the most important concepts related to my topics.

I hear you asking: Can you explain a concept in just 60 seconds?

Yes, you can. It just takes some planning. Here’s how to create an explainer video.

1. Define your audience and the video’s purpose.

As a brand, you’ve likely already defined your target audience. However, for good measure, I’m including this as the first step as a general reminder. Drill down on the precise segment of your audience whom you’re trying to reach with each video.

To create the most helpful explainer videos, think about their questions and jot them down. Once you’ve made a list of questions, choose one question for your explainer video. Answering the one question will be the goal of your video.

2. Write a script.

I’m the World’s Worst for losing my train of thought when recording a video. When I created tons of explainer videos for my students, I found it helpful to write a short script.

Your script might be a word-for-word explanation of the concept. Or if you’re good at talking without saying “um,” you could use a bullet point list.

3. Plan your visuals.

Before you record, plan your visuals. Appropriate visuals can increase engagement and help explain your points.

I used slide presentations as backgrounds in my videos to explain the concepts further. Using video tech, I could easily highlight or point to information, helping to draw attention to important points.

4. Consider your video’s style.

I often created talking head videos, which feature a creator’s head in the corner of the screen.

Thankfully, video editing apps give you options. You can easily create animated videos or talking head videos, both of which are highly effective for explaining your content.

5. Record your content.

There are several ways to record your content. The most popular method is a camera, but I find using microapps like Clip Creator to be just as effective.

With Clip Creator, you can enter your script and create a slide presentation video in minutes. This saves time and, if you’re nervous about being on camera, can help reduce the jitters. (But trust me, the more you’re in front of the camera, the easier it will be!)

6. Spend time editing your video.

Raw video footage can be rough. Of course, that could just be a problem for me since video creation is not one of my main skills. So, before you post your content to your social media feeds, take a few minutes to edit it. There is plenty of editing software available online.

Editing helps make your video more professional, and certain editing elements can increase engagement. Shorter videos work well when there are engaging elements added throughout the video, like:

• An engaging hook.
• Transitions.
• B-roll footage.
• Sound effects.
• Trending music.
• Voiceovers.
• CTAs.

7. Review and post it.

Once you’re happy with your final product, take a few minutes to review it before posting. I find it helpful to walk away from the project and pick it up a few hours later. This helps me see my work with fresh eyes, making finding any content or editing errors easier.

When you’re ready, post it to your marketing channels. Since short-form video doesn’t give you much time, add your CTA to your description box. Your video’s description box can drive traffic to long-form content on the topic, like a blog post or an ebook, or to your landing page to increase conversions.

How long does it take to make an explainer video?

I’m not a mind reader, but I bet I know what you’re thinking. After reading the steps to create an explainer video, you’re likely wondering how long it takes to make one.

In my experience, creating explainer videos took me several hours. Let me be clear: My videos were not professional productions. They lacked engaging edits and weren’t even very good, but they got my points across.

For brands who want to create educational content, it takes quite a bit more time than the few hours I would spend on my video content.

In fact, according to Yum Yum Productions, it can take anywhere from two weeks to a few months to create and edit a professional explainer video. Explain Ninja also agrees with that. According to them, planning and producing an explainer video takes four to five weeks.

So, if you’re using video as a marketing channel, the odds are high that you’ll always have several videos in production. Outsourcing your video content creation is helpful and can save you time.

However, you’ll need to factor in turnaround times, which is why Yum Yum Productions and Explain Ninja say it can take several weeks.

How much do explainer videos cost?

Recently, HubSpot surveyed over 300 video marketing professionals to better understand how video supports their marketing efforts.

I found it interesting that 30% of those surveyed mentioned they publish between 8 and 10 videos for their brand each month. Of those, 36% say they primarily focus on educational video content.

When you need to create eight or more videos a month, it can quickly eat up your hours, considering you’ll need to plan your content, write a script, record, and edit. This is why many marketers outsource video creation to freelance video editors or agencies.

Our friends at Wyzowl surveyed over 240 brands to get an idea of how much an explainer video costs. Let’s look at what marketers said were the low and high ends of the cost of explainer videos.

The Lowest Cost of an Explainer Video

Wyzowl found that some brands pay just $600 for an animated explainer video.

The fact that you can get an explainer video for less than four figures is great news for startups.

However, if you do opt to work with a lower-cost agency, a word of caution: Make sure that you know the total price of your video. Some agencies will quote a lower price but then add extra charges later down the line, such as a voiceover charge and a charge for every amendment.

The Highest Price for an Explainer Video

The highest price a brand said they’ve paid for an explainer video is $250,000.

As you can see, there is a huge contrast between the lowest price and the highest price, showing the diversity of the industry.

Agencies that charge more for their explainer videos will likely appeal to enterprise-level businesses with a generous marketing budget to play with and are happy to hand that over to the professionals to ensure their product, brand, or service makes a splash.

However, when spending a large amount of money on an explainer video, it is essential to consider your ROI. While 90% of marketers agree that video gives them good ROI, the more you invest, the more difficult it is to make a return.

How much should I expect to pay for my explainer video?

According to the brands that participated in Wyzowl’s survey, the average cost of an explainer video is $10,983.

When you take all of the costs required to create an explainer video into account:

• Hiring Creatives, which costs between $300 and $2,000 or more.
• Sourcing music & sound effects, which can be as low as $250 up to $2,000 or more.
• Equipment, costing between $500 and $5,000.
• Software pricing varies based on your preferred AI video editing tools.
• Time, which is invaluable.

This price seems right about “on the money” (excuse the pun). However, don’t let the sticker price shock you, especially if you’ve got a smaller video budget. There are ways you can save on your explainer video costs, like using AI microapps to help cut down on production costs.

Explainer Videos With AI

For brands that want to stretch their marketing budget on video creation, AI is proving to be a cost-saving tool. Here’s how they’re using it:

• 24% use AI to generate video outlines.
• 21% use AI to create video scripts.
• 36% use AI to enhance their videos with specific visual effects.
• 20% use AI to create virtual avatars with human voiceover narration.

Microapps like Clip Creator use AI to turn a simple script into a video slideshow quickly.

You can use ChatGPT for free to help you brainstorm, outline your videos, and write a script. Then, use Clip Creator to generate a slide presentation video quickly.

Microapps significantly cut down the costs of explainer videos and can be more cost-effective than outsourcing your work. With the money saved by creating AI-generated videos, you can allocate that money to other video projects that you need to source.

For example, video projects that require studio space, more in-depth editing, or even an actor.

Explainer Videos: Valuable Content for Brands

It’s safe to say that my classroom budget during the pandemic would not have afforded me the ease of outsourcing video creation. However, if I had access to microapps, the cost of explainer videos would have been way more affordable. And I could have saved so much time!

Explainer videos are valuable content that helps increase your ROI and educate your audience. However, it doesn’t have to break the bank. AI microapps can help marketers quickly create branded content at a fraction of the cost.

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