Category Archives: B2B

Welcome to Breaking the Blueprint — a new blog series that dives into the unique business challenges and opportunities of Black business owners and entrepreneurs. Learn how they’ve grown or scaled their businesses, explored entrepreneurial ventures within their companies, or created side hustles, and how their stories can inspire and inform your own success.

Over the last year and a half, entrepreneurs have had to revamp their marketing strategies to navigate doing business during a pandemic. This shift hasn’t been easy, especially for Black business owners. According to an H&R Block study, more than half of Black-owned small businesses experienced at least a 50% decrease in revenue during the pandemic.

As a Black woman who launched two businesses in the last year and a half, I’ve had to revisit my marketing strategy to avoid this dip in revenue. My goal was to pay close attention to who my audience is, keep track of performance metrics, and create engaging content without wasting time or money. The key was to use marketing tools that make our company more strategy-focused and data-driven.

If you have a small team, you don’t always have to hire more people to maximize results — you can invest in tools and systems to streamline your marketing strategies. Read on to discover seven high-quality tools that are user-friendly, cost-effective, and able to help you succeed.

7 Marketing Tools for Black-Owned Businesses

1. HubSpot

Best for: Customer Relationship Management

Price: Starts at $45/mo

If your marketing strategy is on point, you’ll have leads flowing in with ease. Keeping track of those leads can tell you what converted them to a buyer — this is key for knowing what’s working in your marketing strategy.

Our team uses HubSpot’s CRM tool to keep track of conversions, and when revisiting our marketing strategy, we look at two essential items:

• How did the lead hear about us
• What services/products are they interested in

Your marketing strategy should include a clear overview of your buyer’s journey, from awareness to decision making. HubSpot’s Deal Stages dashboard houses this important data. That way, you can keep track of each stage, and better nurture leads with relevant content.  

Image Source

2. Mailerlite

Best for: Email marketing

Price: Free, then $10 if you have less than 1,000 subscribers

My company Perfeqta started using Mailerlite this year and the benefits are endless. With the tool my team has been able to:

• Easily design landing pages and newsletter campaigns with a drag-and-drop editor.
• Create pop-ups and embed forms to add to our company website.
• Monitor subscriber lists and divide them into interest groups.
• Quickly access campaign reports to understand results.

Image Source

For those who are less email marketing savvy, Mailerlite’s academy program will walk you through its core functions so you can start building email campaigns within a few days’ time. Because of the free plan, this is one of the most cost-friendly options for all of its features.

3. Buffer

Best for: Social media marketing

Price: Free for three social channels – $10/mo per social channel for unlimited channels

Buffer is an all-in-one social media tool that my team uses to manage 12 different accounts. The dashboard is incredibly user-friendly, and it is easy to schedule (as shown in the image below), review, and publish content without having to change pages or switch accounts.

Image Source

Here are the key benefits that have allowed my team to maximize their time:

• Approval tool that lets you review posts before they’re published.
• Option to create campaigns and view analytics in one spot.
• Audience demographics so you know who you’re targeting.
• Download reports as charts and images to share with the team.
• A community management tool that lets you reply to comments and engage with followers from your desktop.

And here’s another bonus: If you’re a Black- or POC-owned or -led organization that engages in anti-racism work, Buffer offers a 50% discount.

4. Google Analytics

Best for: Website tracking

Price: Free

No matter the size of your business, tracking website analytics is essential for company success. There’s a reason why many companies use Google Analytics to track customer data — it’s easy to understand, even if you aren’t very familiar with metrics.

Here’s how my team uses Google Analytics to drive our marketing strategy:

• We can see which pages lead to conversions and turn people away, which allows us to make effective changes.
• We can see audience demographics, which gives us a better understanding of who our clients and customers are, where they live, and how they engage with content.
• We can better plan for future marketing campaigns and set attainable goals because we have clear data to reference.

Image Source

As you scale your business, you’ll want to track growth as closely as possible, so you know how to stay connected to your audience and serve them content they will engage with.

5. Canva

Best for: Content creation

Price: Free – $12.99/mo for Pro account

Once a simple software for quick, text-based graphics, Canva has become a full-fledged design suite. My team uses Canva to create content for social posts, presentation decks, flyers, proposals, and more — for only $13 a month.

Image Source

If you don’t have a designer on board, you can use Canva templates for inspiration and customize them based on your brand guidelines.  With a pro account, you can also:

• Import your brand fonts and create brand color palettes.
• Use Canva stock photos, which have become more diverse in ethnic representation.
• Collaborate with your team and comment feedback directly on posts.
• Plan your content and share it directly to your social channels.
• Organize files into folders to keep track of content.
• Export various file formats, including png, jpeg, pdf, gif, and more.

The platform also has a video editor, which helps eliminate the many hours spent creating quick, 60-second social media posts.

6. Asana

Best for: Building out a marketing strategy

Price: Free – $24.00/mo

Effective communication and project management are crucial for running two companies with multiple team members. Asana has made it incredibly easy for me to outline marketing campaigns, assign tasks to responsible individuals, monitor due dates, and link files to specific projects.

Image Source

My team creates visual workflows for our marketing strategies by making lists, cards, and a project calendar for each phase. Here’s how we break down some of our boards:

• Research and Discovery: This section includes links and files to outside research and our brainstorming notes.
• Content: We share links to relevant folders under specific tasks, so it’s easy to pull social media assets and navigate directly to Google Docs, where we write our copy.
• Technical Support: We send our technical specialist reminders to ensure she keeps up with regular website updates and tests our campaigns before they go live.
• Reporting: This is where we create visual charts to help us keep track of progress on an individual and team level.

Asana is also mobile-friendly, so everyone gets project updates sent directly to their phone and email.

7. Moz Pro

Best for: SEO & keyword research

Price: Starting at $99/mo

Spending endless hours creating content isn’t worth it if your target audiences won’t see it — Moz Pro helps ensure that this won’t happen. Use the tool to serve content to your audiences and rank higher in search results, drive traffic to your website, and monitor SEO campaigns, all of which are essential to growing your business and increasing visibility.

Here are the key benefits of Moz Pro:

• Keyword ranking and search visibility score to see what your audience is searching for.
• Link research to increase the number of high-quality links pointing to your website.
• Technical site audits to make sure technical SEO issues don’t go unnoticed.
• SEO insights and reporting so you can use data-driven insights when strategizing for multimedia content.

Image Source

Moz also has tons of resource guides to help you understand link metrics and analytics altogether.  

As Black business owners, it’s essential to have tools and systems that streamline your marketing processes while also supporting your business growth and team growth.

Remember, you don’t need to be an expert in every area of your business. Take advantage of the resources that have already been created by the experts so you can focus on what you do best – building amazing products and services that people love.

In 2018, Musical.ly, music sharing app, was purchased by Chinese tech firm Bytedance and merged with the firm’s new app, TikTok.

It started out as a video-sharing social network where users shared short clips of themselves lip-synching and dancing to trending music. It has since expanded to house more diverse videos and become a creative outlet for brands.

After the merger, TikTok’s active user base grew by almost 800%. Today, the platform has over 1 billion monthly users and brands are using TikTok ads to reach them.

In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about TikTok’s advertising platform and discuss if it’s worth leveraging.

• Types of TikTok Ads
• How do Tiktok ads work?
• How to Set Up Your TikTok Account
• TikTok Ad Review Process
• TikTok Ad Examples
• TikTok Advertising Cost
• Should you leverage TikTok for Business?
• TikTok For Business Pros and Cons

The platform’s stated goal is to help businesses unleash their creative side by teaching them how to use the app through their e-learning service and guiding them through making advertisements on the Ads Manager platform.

The sole marketing format for businesses to use on TikTok is video advertisements. The TikTok For Business Ads Manager platform helps marketers create these advertisements, and they can choose from five different formats.

TopView Ads

TopView ads on TikTok are videos that appear once a day, immediately after a user opens their app for the first time. Here’s an example of a TopView ad by candy company M&M that they’ve created to advertise a virtual Halloween experience.

Image Source

TopView ads can be up to 60 seconds long, which is longer than the typical run-time for TikTok videos. Because of this, it’s perfect for businesses looking to advertise products or services that require longer periods of attention, like TV trailers.

In-Feed Ads

In-Feed ads are videos that appear on a user’s discovery page, otherwise known as the “For You” page. This is where users land when they open the app. The For You page features videos that the TikTok algorithm believes are of interest to the user based on their app activity.

These ads are the fourth video users see as they scroll through their feed. For reference, this type of advertisement is similar to those that appear in a user’s Instagram feed. Here’s an example of an In-Feed ad created by food delivery service GrubHub.

Image Source

In-Feed ads are especially valuable for marketers looking to use TikTok to drive sales conversions, as the videos can feature a call-to-action (CTA). Acorns, a finance business, has used the In-Feed CTA feature to prompt viewers to download their app.

Image Source

Some brands have created their own version of In-Feed ads by partnering directly with influencers. For example, Raising Cane’s Restaurant partnered with famous TikTok influencer Chase Hudson to promote their business.

@lilhuddy

this my way eating @raising.canes what’s yours #CaniacAmbassador #raisingcanes

♬ Stuntin’ On You – Tyla Yaweh

Users who follow Hudson would see this video within their For You feed.

Branded Hashtags

Branded Hashtags are advertisements that businesses use to inspire TikTokers to create content around a brand-related hashtag of their choice. Businesses using this ad format have exclusive access to the hashtag, which is not the case on other social media sites. Its exclusivity comes along with a high price tag, and reported average costs are around $150,000 USD for six days.

For example, say you’re a sportswear company that has just launched a new athletic shirt called Blue Shirt. You may create a branded hashtag called #InMyBlueShirt, where you encourage TikTok users who have your product to post videos of them doing physical activities in the shirt.

Jennifer Lopez, a music artist, has used the Branded Hashtag feature to advertise her song, Pa Ti. The hashtag is called #PaTiChallenge, and Lopez posted a video of herself dancing where she encouraged other TikTok users to take part in the challenge by replicating her dance.

@jlo

Let’s goooo! ✨🚨✨ Can’t wait to see and share some of your best #PaTiChallenge dances! Thanks for kicking it off @charlidamelio! @papijuancho

♬ Pa Ti – Jennifer Lopez & Maluma

The #PaTiChallenge hashtag has garnered 2.4 Billion views.

Hashtag Challenges can be featured on TikTok’s Discover page, where users can find new creators and browse trending hashtags. The Discover page is similar to Instagram’s Explore page.

The hashtag challenge #WorldSeries, sponsored by Major League Baseball, is featured on TikTok’s Discover feed, and the hashtag encourages users to post videos showing how they’ve celebrated baseball games. Clicking on the hashtag brings users to an internal landing page that features the sponsors’ logo, challenge description, and other videos using the hashtag.

Image Source

Brand Takeovers

Brand Takeovers are an ad format that can include TopView, In-Feed, and Branded Hashtags all at once. They can also be videos, gifs, or still images. The takeover aspect of these ads is that TikTok only features one business per day, and the starting cost is around $50,000 USD per day.

Guess, a fashion company, ran a Brand Takeover on TikTok to advertise their denim jeans. Over six days, their TikTok account gained over 12 thousand new followers and generated a 14.3% total engagement rate. Their Brand Takeover included Top View, Branded Hashtag, and In-Feed ads.

Image Source

Branded Effects

Branded Effects ads use 2D, 3D, or AR to add images of your products into TikTok videos. Brands typically create stickers of their products or create filters that TikTokers can use when creating their videos. These filters and stickers increase engagement and brand awareness, as using them typically involve playing brand-specific games.

Puma, a clothing company, used the Branded Effects feature to advertise their new soccer shoes. Their 3D sticker prompted users to play a virtual reality game with a soccer ball. They paired their Branded Effects sticker with a hashtag challenge that generated over 100,000 videos of user-generated content.

Image Source

How do TikTok ads work?

Setting up a TikTok ad is relatively easy.

First, you have to create a business account from which you will build, manage, and track your ads. The next step is describing your business and setting up your payment type.

Now, here’s where the fun starts. You can choose between two ad manager modes: simplified and custom.

In both options, you build your ad in levels. You first outline your campaign, then define your ad group, and finally create your individual ads.

Here’s the difference between these two modes:

• Simplified mode takes a simple and straightforward approach to ad creation, letting Tiktok’s algorithm do the heavy lifting.
• Custom mode gives advertisers full control over their ads with advanced customization options, such as A/B testing, audience targeting based on video and creator interactions, and ad combinations.

Choosing a mode isn’t permanent, you can always switch to another mode.

Now that you know how TikTok ads work, here’s how to set up your account and build your ad.

1. Create a business account.

2. Describe your business.

3. Enter your billing information.

4. Set up your payment type.

5. Select your ads manager mode.

   

6. Build your ad.

    

   Pro-tip: When building your ad, consider Promo, the video marketing tool that allows you to find video templates and create high-quality promotional videos.

7. Review and submit.

TikTok Ad Review Process

When you submit an ad for review, it usually takes 24 hours to review. To avoid any delays, you want to make sure your ad meets the platform’s ad requirements and follows its policies.

Here’s a checklist to use when reviewing your ad before submission:

• The landing page:
  • Is functional and mobile-friendly.
  • Delivers on what it outlines in the ad.
  • Matches the product name in the ad.
  • Is in the language of the region it’s targeting.
  • Doesn’t automatically download files to a user’s device.

• The ad:
  • Is free of spelling and grammatical errors.
  • Contains audio.
  • Is between five to 60 seconds.
  • Doesn’t include excessive use of symbols, spacing, numbers, or capitalization.
  • Matches the caption.
  • Is in the language of the region it’s targeting (or includes subtitles.)
  • Doesn’t include any prohibited products or services. Find a full list here.
  • Is not blurry or pixelized.
  • Follows standard video sizes: 9:16, 1:1, 16:9.

TikTok Ad Examples

1. Fly By Jing

In this TikTok ad, food brand Fly By Jing partnered with food influencer TiffyCooks to demonstrate how easy (and tasty) it is to use the brand’s product.

Leveraging a known influencer is always a great way to raise awareness for your brand and build trust with your audience. Another great thing about this ad is that the offer is clear: Users can get 10% off by clicking on the CTA and using the code.

2. Tiffany & Co.

To promote its latest partnership with Beyoncé and Jay-Z, the brand has launched a series of ads including the artists.

The ad is simple, but effective and leads users to a landing page where they can learn more about the campaign.

3. Omsom

In 20 seconds, this food brand accomplishes a lot.

The video effectively showcases hows how its product is used. The caption also gives users some background on the brand and tells a story in just a few words. In addition, the CTA leads users right to a product page (instead of the homepage) where they convert.

Lastly, too often, ads seem jarring because they don’t fit the feel of the platform. That’s not the case here. The ad feels so natural in the feed that you wouldn’t know it was an ad if you removed the #sponsored tag and CTA.

TikTok Advertising Cost

When it comes to budgeting for Tiktok advertising, here’s the breakdown. You can select a daily or lifetime budget, which can be changed at any point during your campaign.

At the campaign level, you must have a minimum daily and total budget of $50 USD. For an ad group level, your budget must exceed $20 USD daily.

As for the advertising cost, TikTok hasn’t released its pricing policy. However, there is some information out there.

In 2020, Digiday reported that TikTok had a cost-per-mille as low as $1. After running their own experiment, JungleTopp reported that the cost-per-click was $0.19 – much lower than Facebook and Instagram.

With this platform, you can choose between several bidding strategies that are optimized for specific goals.

Should you leverage TikTok in your marketing strategy?

Since peaking in 2020, TikTok has become a go-to advertising platform for many brands. As the number of users increased, the number of ads they saw also followed from 19% in 2020 to 37% in 2021.

A 2021 Kantar report ranked the short-form video platform in the number one spot for ad equity, surpassing Amazon, Instagram, Google, and Twitter. This isn’t the first time either – they also held that spot the year prior.

Despite this impressive ranking, the data suggests marketers are still unsure about the platform. According to the report, many marketers view TikTok as highly innovative but not quite trustworthy.

As such, many prefer to rely on tried-and-true media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.

From a consumer perspective, consumers go to TikTok for authenticity and community.

According to a 2020 Nielsen study surveying global TikTok users, 59% of respondents said they feel a sense of community when they hop on the app. It’s also a major source of discovery for consumers, with 85% of users discovering new content they enjoy on the app.

As a result, the ads that are on the platform also tend to be more creative and a little less “commercial.” The study revealed that 68% of TikTok users globally find that the ads on the platform are unique and different from other social media platforms. In Indonesia, that figure goes up 23%.

So, the audience is there and ready to engage. However, the decision to use TikTok For Business in your marketing strategy ultimately comes down to your business goals and desired campaign outcomes.

To make the decision easier, we’ve compiled a list of pros and cons for marketers to use when making this decision.

TikTok For Business Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
TikTok Ads Manager will help you expose your content to new audiences. The ‘similar audiences’ feature helps you select lookalike audiences that are similar to your target ones. TikTok has a reported 1 billion monthly users and is available in 155 different countries. If your brand is smaller or less well-known, this could bring significant awareness to new audiences. 25% of TikTok’s user base is between 10 and 19, and 22% are between 20 and 29. If your target audiences are of different age groups, you could gain exposure to a new type of customer.	TikTok’s largest user base is not representative of all demographic groups. Since its primary user base is very young, the audiences that businesses market to on the platform may be significantly younger than the intended target audiences. Advertising on the app may require you to tap into a user base that may not understand the need for your product or service.
TikTok thrives off of informal, ‘behind-the-scenes’ content. Authenticity matters to Generation Z, and they tend to shy away from the ‘ sales-to-drive’ leads marketing ads. If your brand or business typically creates sales-driven formal content, utilizing the platform can help you diversify your content types and display a new, creative side of your business.	TikTok requires niche content. The type of content that TikTok calls for may not be in line with your brand mission. If you’re a more serious, sales-focused business, learning to adapt to the fun and exciting content required for TikTok versus just driving sales conversions may be a difficult skill to learn.
TikTok has higher engagement rates than Instagram and Twitter. In 2019, TikTok’s average engagement rate at all follower levels was higher than both Instagram and Twitter. Small accounts with just 1,000 had an average engagement rate of 9.38% . Even if you’re a smaller brand just starting on TikTok, you’re guaranteed to have an engaging audience.	TikTok For Business reporting tool can’t be integrated with other platforms. All marketers know that data is crucial to understanding the success of marketing campaigns. At the moment, it doesn’t seem as though the platform can integrate with your preferred insights tool. While the Ads Manager is convenient, it will require an additional step for collecting data that you can use to understand your campaign engagement and ROI.

Should you choose to incorporate TikTok into your advertising strategy, it can be a valuable tool for growth. While the app does call for niche types of content, brands and businesses can diversify their strategy and advertise to a new audience.

Whatever your final decision is, TikTok For Business is available to those who want to harness the app’s advertising potential.

Have you ever wondered why those pesky social media algorithms exist? Though it may seem like they gatekeep your content, algorithms aren’t out to get you or hide your content from the masses. Let me paint a picture for you.

You’re connected with hundreds of people — maybe even thousands — on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. But when you log in to each of these social networks, it’s likely that you don’t want to be bombarded by every single update from every single connection. That’d be pretty overwhelming, wouldn’t it?

That’s how the folks from each of these social networks feel — and they’ve done plenty of user research to validate that feeling. In fact, that’s exactly why the news feeds — and the algorithms behind them — exist.

All three of today’s most popular social networks have gravitated toward an algorithm-based feed in the effort to create better experiences for their users. The trouble is, each algorithm works differently. What’s worse, they’re constantly changing, making it hard for marketers like us to keep up.

To help get it all straight, we’ve put together this simple guide on how the news feed works on the three most popular social networks: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Let’s dive in.

Note: Keep in mind that the algorithms are constantly changing. We’ll continue to write about major social algorithm changes as they happen.

Essentially, social media algorithms analyze user behavior and prioritize content the platform believes the user wants to see and is most likely to engage with.

Image Source

News Feed Algorithm

Each major social media platform has its own version of a “news feed” style algorithm. Below we’ll dive into the specifics of feed algorithms for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but here’s an overview of what the algorithms for these platforms factor in when prioritizing content.

Engagement

When you first create an account on a social media platform, you’re more likely to see a mix of random content that may not align with your interests. But over time, you’ll see the content will be more in line with your interests. How does that happen?

Social media platforms begin learning your interests and preferences very quickly based on what kind of content you engage with. Once a platform has a good idea of what a user is likely to engage with, they are going to prioritize that type of content in the user’s feed.

Time on Platform

Why does what you engage with matter so much? Well because the more time you spend engaging, the more time you’re likely to spend on a platform. When you spend more time on a platform, you’re susceptible to see (and buy from) advertising that is shown to you. And the more time you spend engaging on a social media platform, the more insight that platform has into your preferences, purchases, and habits.

Now let’s get into the details of how the Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram algorithms work.

Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm

Since the inception of the largest social media platform to date, Facebook’s news feed has been focused on personalizing the social media app’s user experience. According to eMarketer, we spend about 34 minutes each day using the platform.

To give users the best experience possible, Facebook’s team of engineers are constantly studying user behavior and picking up signals that show what kind of content each user is most interested in.

How It Works

The Like button has always been the epicenter of Facebook’s user experience — not only because we see it on everyone’s posts, but because it allows us to personalize our experience (and influence everyone else’s). Since it was first introduced in November 2007, it’s helped Facebook’s engineers figure out which posts were delighting users, boring them, offending them, and so on.

Nowadays, the algorithm that governs Facebook’s News Feed has become much more sophisticated. It isn’t just about the Like button anymore — and not just because reaction buttons are now in the mix. In fact, Facebook’s algorithm is by far the most complicated of the three social networks covered in this post.

Here’s a quick rundown of the most important things Facebook’s algorithm takes into account.

Relevancy Score

When picking posts for each person who logs on to Facebook, the News Feed algorithm takes into account hundreds of variables — and can predict whether a given user will Like, click, comment, share, hide, or even mark a post as spam.

More specifically, the algorithm predicts each of these outcomes with a certain degree of confidence. This prediction is quantified into a single number called a “relevancy score” that’s specific both to you and to that post.

Once every post that could potentially show up in your feed has been assigned a relevancy score, Facebook’s sorting algorithm ranks them and puts them in the order they end up appearing in your feed. This means that every time you log in, the post you see at the top of your News Feed was chosen over thousands of others as the one most likely to make you react and engage.

Ads are given relevancy scores, too, so that Facebook can show users the ads that could matter most to them. Again, this is supposed to give users a better experience — but it’s also helpful for the businesses that are paying for the ads. It’s calculated based on the positive feedback (video views, conversions, etc.) and negative feedback Facebook expects an ad to receive from its target audience. (Learn more about relevancy score for Facebook ads here.)

Prioritizing Friends

Before 2015, Facebook was predicting what users want to see on the News Feed based on more indirect signals, like Likes, comments, and shares of others. Eventually, it added options for users to filter out posts they don’t want to see. But what about helping boost the posts users do want to see?

Through studies and surveys, Facebook found that many users were concerned about missing important updates from friends they cared about the most. In response to these concerns, the social media platform began changing the News Feed algorithm to give more control to the users themselves.

It started in April 2015, when the company began giving priority (in the form of higher relevancy scores) to posts from friends over the Pages they follow and promotional posts. Later that year, in July, Facebook introduced the “See First” feature, which lets you actually hand-pick which accounts — whether friends or followed Pages — you want to see first at the top of your News Feed.

Now, when you want to prioritize a person or page to “see first,” their posts will appear at the top of your News Feed. To prioritize the people or pages you want to “see first”: click the downward-facing arrow in the top-right corner of any Facebook page and select Settings.

In the window that appears, scroll until you find News Feed Preferences and select it.

Next, select Prioritize who to see first.

Finally, select up to 30 of your Facebook friends to add as favorites. You’ll now see posts from these individuals first.

Time Spent on a Post

Facebook started monitoring how much time users spend viewing certain posts. Of course, the time you spend on a post can vary depending on your internet speed, the length of the post, and so on — and the folks at Facebook are aware of that.

However, the platform’s strategists found that dwell time, the act of spending a lot more time on a particular post in their feed compared to the majority of other posts they look at, is a good sign that the content was relevant to them.

How does this play out in the feed? If you spend more time on a particular post, Facebook is more likely to show that post on your friends’ News Feeds.

Video Engagement

In summer 2015, Facebook surveyed users on how they interacted with video on their News Feeds and found that many people who were interested in a given video didn’t necessarily Like it, comment on it, or share it with their friends. Since engagement is one of the primary ways Facebook measures people’s interest in posts, it had to come up with other ways to figure out whether people enjoyed the videos they were seeing.

To do that, the company started monitoring other forms of video engagement — like turning on the audio, switching to full-screen mode, or enabling high definition. So if you turn up the volume on a video or make it full-screen, the algorithm will interpret that as you enjoying the video, and will show you similar videos higher up in your feed.

The update doesn’t mean users will see more videos in their News Feed — only those who already engage more with video-related content.

Facebook’s algorithm is very, very complex, but we hope that gives you a good idea of what it considers important so you can tweak your Facebook marketing strategy accordingly. Now, let’s move on to Twitter.

Twitter’s Timeline Algorithm

Whereas Facebook makes most of the decisions about what will show up in your Facebook News Feed, Twitter’s historically taken a very different approach with what it calls the “Timeline.”

Your Timeline is the stream of tweets from the users you follow that shows up on your account home page when you first log in. It used to be that your Timeline was made up of every single tweet from every user you follow, in chronological order. But the folks at Twitter found that similar to what was happening on Facebook, users felt they were missing all the best tweets from the people they care about most.

The changes made to the Twitter algorithm aren’t nearly as platform-changing as the ones Facebook has made, but they are somewhat of a departure from the real-time element that has defined Twitter since the beginning.

How It Works

The engineers at Twitter have attempted two different approaches for surfacing the “best” tweets first on your Timeline: the “While You Were Away” feature and the even newer “Show me the best Tweets first” feature.

The “While You Were Away” Feature

This feature was added as an attempt to rid users of whatever FOMO (fear of missing out) they might have been feeling from the chronological nature of the original Timeline.

Basically, it’s a recap of some of the best tweets you may not have seen otherwise. How do these tweets make the cut? It’s determined by “user engagement”.

You can’t turn off the feature, but how often you see it depends on how often you use Twitter. The recaps pop up more frequently for users who check the app less often.

The “Show Me the Best Tweets First” Feature

The “Show me the best Tweets first” feature is a little more similar to Facebook’s News Feed. Why? Because it actually changes the content on your Timeline based on a tweet’s relevancy, rather than listing tweets chronologically.

By default, Twitter’s algorithm puts the tweets it thinks you’ll find most interesting at the top of your Timeline, these posts are still recent and in reverse chronological order. These tweets are chosen based on accounts you interact with most, Tweets you engage with, and much more.

The “Best Tweets” Feature

The rest of the tweets will be displayed right underneath, also in reverse chronological order. Unlike the “While you were away” feature, these “best tweets” won’t be highlighted or indicated in any way — so you won’t be able to tell where the “best tweets” stop and the rest of the tweets begin.

There are two ways to remove these “best tweets” from the top of your Timeline. One is a quick fix: You can always refresh your Timeline to see all new tweets at the top in the live way you might have been used to seeing in the past.

But if you want to always see your Timeline live, then Twitter does allow you to opt out of this feature if you’d like — unlike Facebook’s News Feed.

To opt out of this feature: Tap the three-star icon in the top right corner of your screen. Then tap Switch to the latest Tweets.

Is Twitter Moving Away From a Real-Time Timeline?

There’s no reason to believe so — at least not right now. One of the three sections of your Twitter timeline is composed of tweets displayed in reverse-chronological order. After you scroll through the “While you were away” Tweets and “Best Tweets” you’ll be left with the tweets from your followers starting with the most recent.

What might be an emerging trend on Twitter is the opportunity to subscribe to people’s tweets. While this feature wouldn’t disrupt the timeline’s mostly reverse-chronological order, it could add just one more section to your feed that you’ll need to scroll through before seeing the latest updates from your followers.

Twitter isn’t the only social media platform iterating its algorithm to show the most interesting content first — Instagram’s algorithm is giving Facebook and Twitter a run for their money.

The Instagram Feed’s Algorithm

As of January 2021, Instagram has more than 1.2 million active users on the platform making it a hotspot for marketers in nearly any industry. However, it’s a newer platform compared to the other two on this list, so many of us marketers are still trying to figure it out. The best place to start is from the bottom up — with the algorithm.

Instagram’s algorithm has evolved since 2016 when it first began sorting users’ news feeds in order of relevance rather than recency. Now, the algorithm works similarly to its parent company’s — Facebook. Using machine learning to aggregate six factors, Instagram can determine what content you’ll appreciate the most and influence your news feed to prioritize that content.

These six factors shared by TechCrunch are:

• Interest: This is a prediction Instagram makes about how interested you’ll be in a particular post.
• Frequency: How often you use the app that will determine what posts you see first when you open the app again.
• Following: The more people you follow, the less likely you’ll be able to see everyone in your news feed.
• Recency: How recently was a post published? This impacts when you’ll see a post in your news feed.
• Relationship: Who shared the post and your connection to them will be a significant factor in how often you’ll see their content. This is influenced by tagged photos, engagement, and even how often you direct message them.
• Usage: The time you spend on Instagram affects the content you see as well.

What about the Reels, Shop, and Explore pages?

With the advent of Reels, Shop, and the Explore page, there are several opportunities for Instagram users to naturally affect the factors listed above by interacting with content outside of their news feeds. If you enjoy cooking videos, for example, you may see more of those types of videos and reels in your news feed.

Is Instagram removing likes?

We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention one of the more controversial Instagram algorithm updates — removing likes. Removing one of the most popular features of the app was initially tested as a measure against bullying and increased pressure to post content that garners more and more social approval for young Instagrammers.

The change began in several countries including Canada, Brazil, and Australia. Ultimately, Instagram decided against removing like counts for all users, and instead gave users the option to hide public like counts on their own posts, and the ability to apply this change to all posts in their feed under account settings.

Image Source

Other Key Algorithms

In addition to updates in the main feed, it’s important to note that each main area of a social media platform has its own algorithm. That means the content that gets shown to you on your Instagram feed is operating on a different algorithm than the Instagram stories that are shown to you.

The biggest differences are between how users are shown photo and video content, respectively. Let’s discuss some of the other key algorithms that impact what content users see and when.

Inappropriate Language

Social media platforms are constantly on the lookout for ways to keep users safe, especially younger users. Platforms may scan content for certain words or subject matter that may be deemed inappropriate, which could lead to that content being deprioritized in the feed.

Copyrighted Content

Have you ever tried to add copyrighted music or video clips to a piece of content? Chances are, it was either quickly flagged and removed or potentially had lower reach. That’s because copyrighted content is often not included in the licensing agreements social media platforms have, and can be a liability, and can impose legal consequences for users and platforms responsible for distribution.

It’s best to avoid including copyrighted elements you don’t have the rights to and follow the specific platform’s guidelines for appropriate ways to incorporate elements such as music in your content.

Cross-Platform Content

While repurposing content is a common best practice among marketers and creators, doing so can have implications on content reach.>

In early 2021, Instagram announced the algorithm will prioritize recommending Reels that do not have visible TikTok logos, in an effort to discourage users from cross-posting TikTok content to Instagram. That means if a user downloads a video they have created on TikTok and shares the same video with the TikTok watermark to Instagram, the Instagram algorithm will potentially show that content to fewer people.

For maximum engagement potential, Instagram’s @creators account encourages users to create fresh content for Instagram instead of cross-posting content from other platforms (particularly TikTok). To get around this, some users take to third-party websites to download their TikTok without watermarks and post to Instagram.

It’s All About Content Quality

The key takeaway for brands and individuals alike is this: Quality is Queen.

These algorithms are meant to filter out irrelevant and poor-quality posts so that the highest-quality content gets through. Control over what users see and don’t see is a collaboration between the social platform and the user. The user interacts with what they find interesting and the social media platform takes note and shows you more of that the next time you open the app.

The big lesson for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram marketers like us is to remember that it’s our job to post content to social that’s interesting, entertaining, helpful, and/or relevant to our audiences. This means picking relevant topics, writing delightful copy, and posting compelling images and videos.

By following these best practices, your posts will have a better chance of getting shown to users — so you can continue to inspire, delight, and educate them.

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

Email marketing is continually evolving as subscriber preferences shift toward more personalized experiences. On average, 99% of people check their email every day, and the average email open rate is 17.61%.

However, that doesn’t guarantee your email will make the cut. Several factors impact email deliverability, opens, clicks, and conversions. So, what’s the first step to keeping your email KPIs strong? A clean email list. Clean email lists (with a great email marketing strategy behind them) will keep your email engagement high and your unsubscribe and spam rates low.

1. Limit unsubscribes.

The more people on your email list, the higher the likelihood that some have lost interest in your email. It happens. It could be a good idea to review engagement and remove any subscribers who no longer seem interested before they hit the unsubscribe button.

2. Decrease spam complaints.

Spam complaints are bad for your reputation with ESPs. If your emails are constantly marked as spam, your ESP might flag your account for sending unwanted solicitations. If this happens too often, your deliverability rate can suffer.

3. Improve deliverability.

The cleaner your list is, the greater the number of subscribers who want to open it. On the other hand, a list full of people who don’t engage, have changed their email address, or worse, never opted in will result in spam filters and bounces — both of which can hurt your deliverability.

4. Improve a reduced open rate.

Quality over quantity is the goal here. If you start to see your open rate decline, take a look at your list and check for inactive subscribers. Of course, you’ll want to attempt a reengagement campaign before removing them. If that doesn’t work, you should consider retaining only your active subscribers.

5. Keep costs down.

Many ESPs tier their pricing by the number of emails you send. In order to keep your costs down, you’ll want to remove the subscribers who are receiving your emails and never opening them.

All of these add up to one big red flag — your email subscribers aren’t engaged (or aren’t getting your emails). When people unsubscribe from your email list they are actively opting out of receiving your emails. If several of your emails get marked as spam, your deliverability rates will suffer.

Open and click through rates tell you how many of your subscribers are opening the email you sent, clicking on a link, and ultimately, if they’re interested in the content you’re sharing.

Making sure your email lists are clean and targeting the right audience increases your ROI and decreases the chances of your marketing emails being flagged as spam. Cleaning up your email lists gives you a better chance to reach and engage your audience.

You also want to consider the number of subscribers coming in every quarter — if it’s high, you might want to check your lists more often. If you’re seeing a high number of bounces, then that’s an indicator that it’s time to clean your email list.

Every company is different so clean up can happen monthly, quarterly, bi-annually, or annually but it should be done at least once a year.

1. Identify disengaged subscribers.

Before you scrub your list, you’ll want to identify whether a subscriber is truly inactive or simply disengaged. The former could mean you’ll need to remove them, while the latter might mean you still have a chance to win them over. A disengaged subscriber might just need some more targeted marketing to refresh their interest in your emails. After all, they did subscribe to your list at some point.

To do this, you’ll need to set some criteria for what “disengaged” means. Have they not opened an email in three months? One year? Have they not engaged with any campaigns? Have they not clicked on any links in six months?

Once you’ve identified your disengaged subscribers, you’ll want to place them in a separate list, filter for common themes, and identify a strategy to pique their interest. That could mean a discount code, a personalized subject line, or some other engagement strategy. The point is: before you write off these subscribers, give reengagement your best shot.

If reengagement doesn’t work, then you can truly mark the subscriber as disengaged and inactive.

2. Identify reasons for bounces.

Bounce rates are terrible for email deliverability, but not all bounces are created equal. There’s a difference between a hard bounce and a soft bounce. The former is a permanent issue, like an inactive email, and the latter is a temporary problem, like a full inbox.

You’ll need to remove emails that have a hard bounce, but keep an eye on soft bounces, as the problem could resolve over time.

3. Check for spam filters.

You’ll want to remove any subscribers that mark your email as spam immediately. Spam filters hurt your deliverability and your reputation. If a subscriber no longer finds your emails helpful, or worse, sees them as spam, then it’s best to part ways by removing them from your list.

4. Clear out inactive subscribers.

The final step in cleaning out your email list is to create separate lists for all the categories above and remove the emails from your list that are no longer active. It might be hard to part ways with these emails, but, in the end, you’re doing your deliverability and engagement rates a huge favor.

1. Make sure your list has good hygiene.

The key to a squeaky clean list is to have a great routine and stick with it. Create a schedule for cleaning up your lists by looking at your data quantity and quality. This will determine how often you will have to clean your list. No matter how big your list, if most of your subscribers are not interacting with your emails, it is time to assess why.

When looking through your email lists, check for duplicates, typos, and email addresses that have the word “spam” in them so that your emails are getting sent to the right person and are not bouncing. ”

2. Consider using double opt-ins.

A double opt-in is a way to ensure that your subscribers truly want your email. Here’s how it works: once a user submits their information to a form on your site, an email is sent to confirm their subscription. This does a few things: it gets them used to opening your emails, it signals to their email provider that your emails should not be automatically marked as spam, and it gives you an opportunity to ask them to save your contact info so emails don’t get lost. All around, a win.

3. Manage bounce rate.

Bounced emails happen when there is a typo in the email address, if the email no longer exists, or for a number of other reasons. Checking for bounced emails can increase your deliverability and email ROI. Email bounces are broken down into two categories: soft and hard bounces.

A soft bounce is a temporary deliverability problem, such as a full inbox or a server that is down. Resending emails to these addresses can be beneficial because they can go through eventually.

A hard bounce happens due to permanent deliverability problems, such as an invalid email address. When you have hard bounces it is imperative to remove these addresses from your lists to keep your Email Service Providers (ESPs) happy. ESPs track the number of bounces you generate with each send and use it when determining your email credibility. Getting too many hard bounces is equivalent to people automatically putting your emails in the Spam folder.

4. Use automation.

Marketing automation is for emails, too. You can have your CRM automatically send subscribers to certain lists (or tag them) based on their actions. Remember when we discussed moving inactive subscribers to a separate list? Well, instead of doing this manually, you can set up an automation that does this for you and triggers a reengagement campaign. Another way you can use automation is to remove subscribers from email workflows or campaigns that are no longer applicable to them.

5. Provide an “opt down” option.

Have an “opt down” option in addition to an “opt out” option. An “opt down” option lets your subscribers choose how often and which emails they want to receive from you. Unfortunately, subscribers can forget that they subscribed to your email lists, increasing the chance that they will delete, unsubscribe, or put you straight in the Spam folder — all undesirable outcomes. Providing an “Opt Down” option provides an opportunity for the subscriber to stay on your list without the overwhelm of receiving correspondence they don’t want.

6. Understand your email audience.

Before cleaning out your email list, take stock of how much your current audience aligns with your ideal audience. Look for ways to re-engage inactive subscribers by separating them into lists based on their interests and demographics. For example, you could create engaging welcome emails for new subscribers or whip up a discount campaign for older subscribers. Having multiple lists helps you to create campaigns that’ll drive conversion rates up.

All in all, the success of email marketing campaigns should not be measured by the number of subscribers but by the quality of the subscribers and the actions they take as a result of your email. Therefore, it’s better to deploy campaigns to 20,000 active and engaged people than it is to blast the email to 30,000 people if half of them don’t care, will delete it, or worse, report it as spam.

7. Remove inactive subscribers.

Inactive subscribers are those who do not open, click, or engage in your emails in any form. Having engaged subscribers will always be beneficial to your conversion rates, so by removing inactive subscribers you will drive up your open and click through rates for your campaigns.

Before you remove inactive subscribers permanently you can try sending them one last email campaign that could be a feedback campaign to see what will re-engage them. If all fails you’ll need to permanently delete them as subscribers to not hurt your email deliverability and conversion rates.

Start Cleaning Out That Email List

Email marketing is essential to any industry and doing a routine clean up can be beneficial to your company’s data reports and conversion rates. As long as you’re performing routine clean ups, maintaining your open and click through rates, managing bounce and spam rates, and engaging your lists with targeted emails of their interest, you will always have a squeaky clean email list.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in October 2011 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

If you want to grow your business, great search engine optimization (SEO) is a must: Recent survey data found that 53 percent of all trackable website traffic originated from organic search, which means that if you want to get noticed, you need to show up at the top of search rankings.

The challenge? Many small businesses don’t have the time, skills or expertise necessary to handle everything that comes with a solid SEO strategy. From keyword research to content evaluation, from page optimization to internal linking, it’s easy for companies to end up with a generic web presence that doesn’t inspire engagement or drive conversions.

The result? It’s worth considering an SEO consultant or agency to help manage this process and maximize your impact. In this piece, we’ll tackle key outsourcing operations, including how it can benefit your business — and why SEO can’t be entirely outsourced. Then, we’ll break down top SEO pitfalls and offer actionable advice to find an SEO agency that best fits your brand.

Why Outsourcing SEO Can Be a Good Idea

Designing an effective SEO strategy isn’t a simple task. Companies have to consider how search engines are evaluating content, what aspects of SEO offer the most impact, and where they could change their current content to better align with search engine expectations.

This is especially critical as search engines like Google continually refine their ranking process. For example, page loading speed is now a factor in search result rankings. In practice, this expands the role of SEO; it’s not enough to simply weave in popular keywords and deliver high-quality content. Brands also need to consider the entire user experience.

As a result, it’s often worth outsourcing SEO services to ensure that your digital presence is generating maximum impact and capturing the highest volume of prospective customers. In much the same way that companies outsource their marketing efforts to experts, outsourcing SEO provides a way for brands to identify key strategic goals and then leave the complex process of meeting those goals to industry experts.

For small businesses and entrepreneurs, outsourcing offers the big benefit of time: Instead of learning about the ins and outs of SEO, testing new strategies, and refining results, business owners and managers can focus on customer conversions, product improvements, and new ideas.

Why Your Business Can’t Fully Outsource SEO

While it’s possible to outsource much of your SEO strategy to an agency or consultant, there are aspects of the process that still rest within your business. These include:

Your Keywords

Although an SEO expert can help pinpoint specific keywords of opportunity, you’re often the authority on the core keywords that define your business and operations. You know that if you stray too far from these keywords, your brand simply won’t be the same — and customers that do end up on your site may be there looking for something else. As a result, you always have a role to play in choosing ideal keywords.

Your Content

The content on your site is unique to your brand. And while SEO agencies have gotten much better at creating targeted content designed to attract your market, there are some aspects of your onsite content — such as information about the history and mission of your business — that you’re best-suited to create and manage.

Your Relationships

No matter how good your SEO provider may be, they can’t replicate the relationships you have with other businesses, suppliers and partners. This means that while they’re able to provide strategy for your SEO framework, you provide the connective tissue that makes it possible for your content to be posted (and reposted) across your industry network.

Your Brand Perspective

The unique nature of your brand perspective is what’s taken you this far — and it’s what will continue to drive your growth. Even the best SEO agency can’t be in your head; they don’t know what your brand means to you or how you want to communicate your message to the world. As a result, outsourcing SEO is ideal for laying a foundation for conversion and revenue, but it only works when paired with your perspective.

Your Growth Strategy

While you provide general goals to your SEO agency — such as increasing your rankings for a specific keyword by X amount or boosting total website visits — you’re still responsible for your overall growth strategy. Where do you want to be in a month? A year? Five? And how can your SEO partner help you get there?

Five Common Pitfalls to Avoid in SEO

Every business is different, but the principles of SEO remain the same: Rank higher in search engines for popular keywords to drive more traffic to your site. The challenge? Reaching this goal isn’t easy, leading some brands and SEO agencies to make potentially costly mistakes. Here are the top five pitfalls to avoid.

Keyword Stuffing

If there’s a cardinal rule of modern SEO it’s this: Don’t keyword stuff.

Stuffing is the practice of adding the same keyword over and over to your content with the intention of ranking higher. The problem? Search engines are now smart enough to detect this practice and will down-rank your site if keyword stuffing is detected. Generally speaking, one instance of your primary keyword per piece of content is enough to get noticed.

Duplicate Content

Next up is duplicate content. While more content on your site with keywords can help you rank higher, simply copying and pasting content — or slightly changing content to include a new keyword — lowers the overall value of your site and in turn your ranking.

Put simply? New content is always better than old.

Low-quality Backlinks

Backlinks can help increase the relevance and authority of your content — but only if they link to high-quality sites. If your content links out to sites that are continually keyword stuffing or don’t receive many visitor views, you won’t enjoy a bump in search rankings. In fact, links to these sites may hurt your overall standing.

Unoptimized Images

Images help capture user interest, but it’s not enough to simply put pictures on your site: You also need to ensure they’re optimized.

This starts with the image itself. Make sure it’s relevant and easy to understand. For example, if you run a construction company, use an image that’s related to the services that you offer and that’s high enough quality that users can immediately tell what it is. If the image is low-resolution or confusing, users won’t bother sticking around.

It’s also a good idea to look at the size of your images. Here’s why: The more images you have on your site, the slower it loads. Optimizing images for size (without losing quality) can help improve the user experience and your search rankings.

Muddled Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are snippets of text that offer a quick description of content on a specific page. Here, clear and concise descriptions are critical. Muddled or vague meta descriptions make it easy for users to overlook your site. Ideally, you want to use your primary keyword and provide a quick overview of the page in question so users know what they’re getting into.

Simply put? Ask questions. Not sure which ones to ask? We’ve got you covered.

Let’s explore each question in more detail.

1. What makes you different?

While the process of SEO is fairly straightforward, approaches differ significantly. Some companies rely solely on specific metrics, while others opt for a more organic approach or a more middle-ground stance. As a result, it’s worth asking agencies and consultants what sets them apart from the competition — what can they offer to boost your rankings and drive traffic?

Quick tip: Listen to what they say and then fact-check it against their own site’s SEO rankings. If they don’t show up near the top of their page for their own targeted keyword, consider looking elsewhere for help.

2. What’s your process?

Your prospective partners should be able to lay out their process in a way that’s clear, concise, and understandable. If you find yourself on the receiving end of too many buzzwords or big promises with no underlying proof, other choices may be a better fit.

3. What are your tools?

From the HubSpot Website Grader to Ahrefs, from SEMRush to Moz Pro, there are a host of SEO tools available. Many agencies will also have their own proprietary tools they use alongside these popular offerings — look for a provider willing to specify what tools they use, why, and how.

4. How long will results take?

Beware any company that promises instant results. SEO rankings don’t increase until search engine “spiders” have crawled the web to assess site changes and their impact. Generally speaking, substantive results start showing up around the 4-to-6 month mark.

5. What are your metrics?

Metrics matter in SEO. These include new referring domains, text readability, keyword rankings, organic search volumes, lead conversions, bounce rate, and click-through rate. All are relevant depending on their context and all measure different aspects of SEO impact. Always ask your potential provider what metrics they use and why, and ask for an explanation of how they impact results.

6. How often do you report data?

Data reporting is key to tracking SEO success. Some companies report results weekly; for others, this frequency is every other week or even monthly. Here, go with whatever you’re comfortable with — while longer reporting periods may show more change, they may also miss key indicators that strategies aren’t working or need to be adjusted.

7. Who have you helped?

Finally, ask for references. If your prospective SEO provider is as good as they say they are, they should have data that shows how they’ve boosted the impact of other brands. If they’re short on specific data and big on promises, tread carefully.

Solving for SEO

A solid SEO strategy can help your brand rank higher in search engine results and drive more traffic to your business. Outsourcing is a great way to jumpstart this process — the right agency can give you the advantage when it comes to getting noticed and capturing customer interest.

But outsourcing alone isn’t enough. Your brand perspective is critical to drive success and avoid common pitfalls. Not sure where to get started learning SEO? HubSpot has you covered.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in June 2008 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Content. Links. RankBrain.

These are the top-ranking factors Google considers when it comes to showing results on the search engine result page (SERP). Given that much of search engine optimization centers around getting lots of good links to and from your website, it’s essential to learn how to make these links work for you.

In this article, we discuss what external linking is and why you should do it. We also reveal seven external linking best practices. At the end of this article, you’ll know how to use external linking to help your content appear higher on the search engine results page.

When should you link to other sites in SEO?

External links are hyperlinks that direct readers to a website other than your own. On the surface, using external links seems counter-intuitive—these links take people away from your website, after all. However, as we shall see later in this article, it’s one of the most essential sources of ranking power you can ever use.

Four Benefits of External Linking

Linking to outside websites, when done right, offers several benefits:

1. External linking improves your credibility.

When you add trustworthy and relevant website links to your content, it improves the credibility of your website. In addition, valuable external links provide your readers with references, which will enhance your website’s authority.

External linking is similar to the way you cite sources in a bibliography for an academic paper—it shows that you’ve created your content based on sound research.

2. External linking improves your SEO.

The external links you add can assist search engines in determining the usefulness and quality of your pages. High-quality pages usually link to other high-quality pages; thus, search engines will look at your content favorably, helping you rank higher.

If you link to an interesting article on a critical topic of interest to your business, Google uses this as one way to know what your website is about.

3. External linking is an easy way to create connections.

Other websites can tell when you’re linking to them. And the chances are that they might return the favor and link back to your website if the opportunity arises, which is great because the more quality backlinks you get, the better.

It’s an easy and positive way to reach out, make connections in your industry, and get your content in front of the right audience.

4. External linking offers readers more value.

Adding external links provides a better user experience for readers. These links lead to related information that adds to the value in your content without duplicating content. When readers see that you consistently link out to resources that’d help them understand a topic better, they’ll begin to associate more value with your website.

External Linking Best Practices

According to Google, linking is one of the most important factors for achieving high rankings, you must understand how to use external linking to your advantage. Here are key external linking best practices to adopt.

1. Make the links relevant.

When adding external links, don’t just add links for the sake of it. Instead, add links that direct readers to relevant content.

Good external links tend to point to related content. Examples of what you might link to include statistics, infographics, videos, etc.

Google and other search engines value users and want to show the most relevant results to their query. Therefore, when external links come from websites in the same niche, Google better understands the relevance of your content and its popularity, leading to a higher SERP ranking.

Example

2. Link to reputable sources.

The external link in the image above has 60% as its anchor text. It leads to a website that contains that statistic and other relevant information.

When linking externally, only link to sites that are authoritative and trustworthy. If you link to websites that promote clickbait content or aren’t professional, you’ll diminish your reader’s trust. And it could negatively affect how search engines rank your content.

If you have no choice but to link to websites where you don’t trust the content, use a no-follow tag. This tag indicates to search engine crawlers that the linked page shouldn’t be associated with your page.

Example

The latest content marketing report compiled by HubSpot is full of external links to reputable sources in the content marketing industry.

Image Source

3. Use anchor text correctly.

Let’s examine a practical example of what makes a good and bad anchor text.

We’ve got an article on HubSpot that talks about how to write a blog post. You can click here to read that article.

See what I did there? The word “here” is what is known as the anchor text for the link. And this anchor text is essential for search engines to read your website. Unfortunately, by using “here” as an anchor text, I’m giving Google very little help or hints about the content of the page I’m linking to.

Instead, here is a much better (and right) way to do this:

The right way: We’ve got a previous article on HubSpot that talks about how to write a blog post.

The second way is much better than the first for multiple reasons.

First, the link is easier for readers to click on (and know that it’s a link). But, more important is the fact that we now have the anchor text as “how to write a blog post.” So, when the search engine spiders “see” this link, they factor in the anchor text when determining what the target page is about.

So, use descriptive keywords in anchor text or keywords the linked page is trying to target. However, don’t shoehorn anchor text into sentences because it can look like spam, and readers might find it annoying.

After including anchor text, read it again. Does it look forced? Does the link look helpful and natural? You want the latter to be true.

Here’s an example where Google gives more information about how to write good link text.

Example

Image Source

4. Add helpful links.

How many external links should you use in your content? There’s no conclusive answer.

However, you shouldn’t overwhelm your reader with too many external or internal links. Your goal when linking should be to provide the best reader experience possible. You might end up losing readers if they feel they’re merely being used as part of your SEO strategy.

Example

This page from Backlinko has at least 150 external links and ranks #1 on the Google SERP for several queries. Therefore, you can have as many external links as you like as long as it makes sense to add them.

Image Source

5. Open external links in a different tab.

Your external links should open in a different tab, and there are various reasons why this is important. However, the most significant reason to have links open in a new tab is that this gives the visitor as much control as possible with their experience on your site.

Example

This article about statistics that prove why link-building is important contains external links that open in a new tab. This lets the reader continue reading the article while also taking a look at the information you linked to without losing one or the other.

6. Don’t link to competing websites.

It’ll be detrimental to link to sites competing for the same keywords. For example, if you’re targeting the keyword “Best toys for dogs,” you shouldn’t link to a site that is already ranking #1 for this keyword.

Instead, link to websites that offer value to your content, like pages that contain general information. Using the “Best toys for dogs” example, you can link to a video about a specific dog toy you’re promoting that’s not on a competitor’s website.

Example

In the image above, HubSpot’s article about the best digital marketing tools doesn’t link to a competing article but links to specific tools like Ahrefs that support the article.

7. Conduct a link audit.

Spend some time every quarter (or within regular intervals) to audit your content for any outdated or broken links. Why’s this important?

When readers encounter broken or outdated external links in your content, it diminishes their experience, and they might begin to lose faith in your credibility.

You can use a tool like Check My Links to find broken links on your website.

Image Source

Build a Successful External Linking Strategy

Quality external links in your content provide more resources to your readers while building your content and website’s authority. When done right, external linking can even boost your ranking on the SERP.

So now is the time to implement all you’ve learned from this article and make external links work for you.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in January 2007 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Posting to Instagram from your computer is a great choice if you don’t have your phone on hand or need to access company assets on your laptop. Or you might simply prefer to use a wider screen.

For these reasons and others, you might be wondering, “Can I post to Instagram from my computer?” We have some good news.

Why post on Instagram from your computer?

Instagram is a popular social media network for sharing photos that’s most commonly accessed through a mobile app. It offers a web version that makes it easy to post assets you may only have on your laptop and not your phone. 

For example, let’s say you’re a social media manager for a prominent brand. The last thing you want to do is have an absentminded mishap where you accidentally post brand content to your personal Instagram account (or, worse, vice versa) simply because you’re logged into both on your phone.

Alternatively, it might be easier to upload company posts and videos via your desktop, rather than having your smartphone open at work.

Plus, your company’s files might be more easily accessible via desktop than mobile. For instance, if you use Photoshop to edit company photos, it’s likely easier to click “Upload” from your desktop when you’re done editing, rather than sending that same photo or video to your personal phone.

Perhaps you simply prefer the larger screen of desktop. Or, maybe you don’t have access to a smartphone so you can’t download the app on your phone.

So there are plenty of good reasons to use Instagram on your computer instead. Here’s how.

While the social platform is primarily meant to be consumed in-app, it offers a nearly identical experience if you access it on your computer.

On Instagram’s web version, you can:

• Watch and reply to other people’s Stories
• Search for hashtags and other users
• Browse your feed
• Comment and like posts
• Reply to direct messages (DMs)
• View your notifications
• Access the Explore tab
• Post photos and videos to your profile

In other words — Yes, you can post to Instagram from your PC or Mac desktop instead of on your mobile device’s app or browser.

Now, let’s explore how you can post images and videos from your desktop computer.

Whether you’re on a Mac or a PC, you can post from your desktop computer. Instagram’s web version allows you to upload an Instagram post the same way you would via mobile, regardless of the platform you use. Below, we’ll discuss how to do it on:

• Chrome
• Safari

Once we discuss how you can post photos, we’ll also discuss how to upload a video to Instagram from your desktop.

1. Open up your Chrome browser.

The first thing you’ll want to do is open up Google Chrome. If you’re on Windows, you can do so by clicking the Windows icon in your task bar. Then, search through the applications you’ve already installed on your computer until you find Chrome.

2. Navigate to Instagram’s website.

Next, navigate to https://www.instagram.com by typing it into the navigation bar. Log in using your Facebook credentials or by inputting your email, phone number, or username. If you’ve logged into Instagram’s web version before, it might include an option to “Continue as [username],” and you’ll be able to automatically log in.

3. Click the “+” button next to the DM symbol.

Instagram’s web version has a top navigation bar that mirrors the navigation bar on the mobile app. It includes a search bar, a home symbol, a DM symbol, a plus sign, a heart, and a circle with your profile picture. Click the plus sign next to the DM symbol.

4. Click “Select from computer” to upload your media.

A popup box will appear with a blue button that says “Select from computer.” Browse until you find the file you’d like to upload.

5. Crop the image, zoom in, or add more media if needed.

Instagram gives you several options for editing the image prior to publication. You can change the aspect ratio, zoom in, or add more media to the same post.

The zoom-in option is right next to the aspect ratio button:

You’ll find the “add more media” button on the lower left-hand corner.

Click the plus sign to add more images to your post, if desired.

6. Choose a filter or make adjustments.

Next, choose a filter, just like you would in the app. You can also adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, and other features.

Once you’re done, click Next in the top right of your screen.

7. Add a caption, location, alt text, and tags.

On the next screen, you’ll be able to add a caption, add a location, or tag people.

8. Click Share.

When you’re ready, click Share in the top right of your screen.

Done! You’ve now posted on Instagram using Chrome.

1. Open up your Safari browser.

The first thing you’ll want to do is open up Safari. To do so, open up Launchpad and find Safari in your list of applications. Alternatively, if you have it pinned in your task bar, you can open it from there.

2. Navigate to Instagram’s website.

Next, navigate to https://www.instagram.com by typing it into Safari’s navigation bar. If you visit the site often enough, Safari may also have a shortcut in your “New tab” page.

Once you get there, login with your preferred credentials. If you’ve already used the web version in the past, Instagram will allow you to log in with one click.

3. Follow steps 3 to 8 from the instructions above.

Once you are able to view Instagram from your Safari browser, you can upload an Instagram post the same way you would on Chrome — by clicking the “+” button, adding a filter or editing the photo, adding a location and caption, and clicking “Share” when you’re ready for your post to go live.

Want to upload a video instead?

How to Post a Video to Instagram Using a Desktop Computer

You can upload videos to Instagram from your desktop — which makes it easy to share professionally-shot videos that may not be readily available on your phone. That means you can share marketing videos and shoots you received from a freelancer or your in-house videographer.

Here’s how to post a video to Instagram on any web browser.

1. Head to the Instagram website on your preferred browser.

Once you’re there, log in using your credentials.

2. Click the “+” button next to the DM symbol.

Just like you would if you were posting a photo, click the + button in the top navigation bar of your Instagram feed.

3. Click “Select from computer” to upload your media.

Select your video file from the computer. We recommend uploading an MP4 file to avoid compatibility issues.

If your video is less than 10 minutes long, your file size should be no bigger than 650 MB. For videos between 10 minutes and 60 minutes (which is the maximum length), you should aim for a file size smaller than 3.6GB. Read more about Instagram’s video requirements here.

4. Resize your video and add more media if desired.

Instagram gives you two options for adjusting your video: Changing the aspect ratio and adding more media. For photos, Instagram also allows you to zoom into the picture. The option isn’t available for videos.

If you’re uploading a horizontal video, we recommend using a 16:9 aspect ratio so that it’s not cut off. If you’re worried about the aesthetics of your feed, stick to a 1:1 ratio. That way, there isn’t any white space when visitors visit your profile.

5. Choose a cover photo, trim the video, and toggle sound options.

Next, you can choose a cover photo (the image users will see before they click “Play”). You have the option of uploading a custom cover photo for the video, and you can also trim the video and turn the sound off if desired.

6. Write a caption, tag other users, add alt text, and toggle commenting options.

In the next screen, you can write a caption for your video, tag anyone who appears in the video, add alt text, and disable commenting.

7. Click Share.

Done! You’ve now posted your video on Instagram.

Alternative Ways to Post to Instagram from Your Computer

You don’t have to access Instagram’s web version to post on Instagram. If you find the web version to be too lacking for your day-to-day tasks, especially if you’re a social media manager, you can use a third-party service that offers social media scheduling software.

HubSpot’s social media management tool is one of the best options you can use to schedule Instagram posts from your desktop — no need to access the Instagram app or website itself.

Here’s one example of us scheduling a video post for Instagram using Social Inbox:

The great benefit of using this method is that you can schedule posts well in advance. You don’t have to access Instagram every time you want to add new media to your profile.

If you’re doing this regularly for your job, it might be worthwhile to explore all the social media scheduling tools at your disposal to choose the one best-suited for your business’ needs.

Using Instagram Like the Pro You Are

Now that you don’t have to worry about transferring photos to your mobile device or juggling your work’s social media account on your own device, you’ll be able to grow on Instagram efficiently and effectively. From there, the sky is the limit for creating posts and growing your audience in a scalable way.

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

Website traffic represents the volume of users visiting your site. Higher is better because more people visiting your site means more opportunities for advertising, engagement, and eventual conversion.

Ideally, you want to steadily increase website traffic, or at least keep it stable over time. But what happens if your traffic starts to drop? Whether it’s slow or sudden, the results are the same: A smaller pool of users who are seeing your content and potentially generating revenue for your brand. Even more worrisome for site admins is that traffic drops may not have an obvious cause. With multiple traffic sources and factors that influence your site ranking and accessibility, even small drops may be the result of several independent or codependent conditions.

While there’s no quick fix for these drops, we’ve got you covered with actionable tips to pinpoint, diagnose and address falling traffic.

Why is my website traffic down?

To boost traffic levels, site owners must first discover why traffic is down. With multiple traffic sources such as email, social media, organic, and referral, it’s not enough to simply know that traffic is falling — you need to identify the source of the drop itself and then take steps to specifically address the problem.

There are several ways to determine which traffic source is driving your numbers down. Let’s take a look at those next.

How To Identify the Source of Traffic Drops

HubSpot Sources

If you’re using HubSpot’s CMS, you can leverage HubSpot Sources to determine where your traffic is coming from. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do this.

Step 1: First, you need to install the HubSpot tracking code on your site. Head to your HubSpot account and click the Settings icon in the main navigation bar.

Step 2: Next, head to Tracking & Analytics and then Tracking Code on the left sidebar.

Step 3: Now you should see the tracking code.

Copy the code and then paste it before the </body> tag in the HTML code on each page of your site you want to track.

Step 4: Once that’s done, head to the Reports section of your account and then Analytics Tools.

Step 5: Next, select Traffic Analytics.

Here, you’ll see the Sources tab, which displays total sessions as a line chart broken out into different colors by traffic type including referrals, social media, email marketing and direct traffic.This gives you a visual representation of where your traffic is coming from and how it’s changed over a specific period of time.

Google Analytics Acquisition Channels

You can also identify traffic sources using Google Analytics.

Step 1: Start by logging into your Google Analytics account and selecting the Acquisition tab.

Step 2: Then, select All Traffic followed by Source/Medium.

This will provide you with a list of traffic sources to your website along with the number of users they’ve brought.

Diagnosing Traffic Drops

Once you’ve determined the source of your traffic drops, you need to diagnose the problem in-depth: What conditions or actions are causing traffic to fall?

Let’s take a look at some common traffic categories and some questions you can ask to determine what’s going on.

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic refers to visitors who land on your site after conducting a web search and clicking on links from the search engine results page (SERP). It’s called “organic” traffic because it doesn’t come from paid advertising or marketing but instead occurs naturally — or organically — as a result of search queries.

If you notice that your organic traffic is down, ask yourself:

Where is my site in the search rankings?

The higher you rank on the SERP, the more likely you’ll earn organic traffic. Do a quick search for your site’s primary keyword and see what comes up. If you’re not on the first page of the search results, then your site is struggling to get visibility in the SERP.

How is my SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website so search engines will find it and rank it highly against similar sites. If each of your webpages isn’t strategically targeting keywords related to your business, you could be missing opportunities to bring traffic to your site.

Direct Traffic

Direct traffic arrives at your site after typing in the name of your site directly, navigating to it through a bookmark or clicking on a direct email link. If you see direct traffic taking a dive, consider:

What do my URLs look like?

Your URLs should be as simple, clean and concise as possible. If you have pages with long and convoluted URLs, users may be attempting to reach your page but find a 404 error instead because they typed your website address into the web browser incorrectly.

Have I recently updated pages?

If you’re recently updated webpages, look for any changes in URLs. If you’ve made changes without properly redirecting the old links to the new ones, visitors may be seeing error pages which will result in traffic drops.

Referral Traffic

Referral traffic typically comes from other sources such as site lists or blogs. This type of traffic is often part of link building campaigns. For example, you might draft and submit a guest blog to a popular website and include a link back to your site at the end.

If you suddenly see a dropoff in previously consistent referral traffic, ask yourself:

Are backlink sites ranking well?

Blogs and site lists can drive referral traffic, but only if they’re getting visitors as well. If you’re seeing a drop, search for your referral sites and see how they rank.

Do my links point to the right page?

Just like the in direct traffic example above, make sure your links are pointing visitors to the right page. If you’ve made recent URL updates, contact blog or site list owners to have them amended.

Paid Search Traffic

Paid search traffic is exactly what it sounds like: Paid ads within the search engines that display advertisements for your website in search results. The more you spend, the more often your ad will appear and the closer it will be to the top of search results.

If you see paid traffic stalling, ask yourself:

Are my ads in the right place?

Ads only work if they’re targeting the right audience. If you own a window-washing company, then it’s not a good idea to display ads on fashion advice blogs because the quantity and quality of traffic probably won’t match your expectations.

Email Traffic

Email traffic comes from links in emails you send to current and prospective customers. These might be newsletters, sales flyers, or targeted advertisements based on customer preferences. If your email traffic starts to decline, consider these questions:

Do I have the right market?

Effective email campaigns target the right market. You need to know who your customers are, how they prefer to interact with brands, and how much they’re willing to spend to create effective emails. If your target market is loosely defined — or absent — start with email marketing tools to help identify your ideal customers.

Are current emails effective?

Not all emails are created equal. Information alone isn’t enough to capture consumer interest — brands must also include actionable next steps that encourage users to click through. To help boost email efficacy consider A/B testing: Create two versions of a marketing email and see which one produces better results, then repeat the process to refine as necessary.

Social Media Traffic

Social media traffic comes from sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram when customers click through on one of your posts and arrive at your website. If your social traffic starts sliding, ask yourself:

Do my social media posts drive action?

Social media posts need to do more than get users to stop scrolling — they must provide enough information to get users interested but leave enough left unsaid to prompt action. In practice, this means creating optimized social posts that convince customers to click through and see what you have to offer.

Am I using the right platform?

Image-driven platforms such as Instagram are great for brands that use images to highlight popular products. Service-based brands, on the other hand, often see better performance from sites such as Facebook. Drilling down to see which platforms are driving your traffic can help pinpoint ideal marketing channels.

While there’s no single way to fix traffic drops, there are general steps that site owners can take to help remedy these issues:

1. Run traffic reports to identify recent changes.

In most cases, traffic drops are the result of multiple factors that combine to lower the number of unique visitors that arrive on your site. Your best bet in this situation is to look at any recent changes to your website, linking strategy or advertising goals.

For example, if you’ve just done a site-wide update to improve the overall design and user experience (UX) and traffic has dropped as a result, run reports to see where your traffic is coming from and if there are specific sources and mediums that have seen a sudden drop. If you notice that direct and referral traffic are down, this may be an indication that URLs are no longer pointing to the right pages.

In order to keep your traffic up, you’ll want to make sound decisions on this data. If you notice one source or medium, in particular, is contributing to the drop, take a look at your processes and workflows there for any gaps that are causing your site to perform poorly.

2. Be better than the competition.

Sometimes it’s not your site that’s the issue. If your competition has managed to corner the SEO market for your industry or have changed their marketing techniques to better target shared customer segments, you may see a drop in traffic.

To determine if this is the case, start by searching for your site’s primary keywords across popular search engines and see what comes up. If you notice competitor sites have pushed yours down the list, they may be outperforming your search optimization. It’s also worth checking your sources to see if social media traffic is down — if so, your competition may be doing a better job driving organic interest across social platforms

To fix this problem, you’ll need to write content and design webpages that are better than every website ranking above yours. This means targeting a specific buyer persona with each page and having clear calls to action.

3. Keep your site healthy.

Site conditions have an impact on how your website is indexed and ranked by search engines. If you see traffic sliding, take a look at current conditions and how they may impact users.

For example, if your site is slow to load because of large image or video files, users won’t stick around and search engines will penalize your ranking. Issues around layout and functionality are also problematic. Broken links or content that’s all fluff and no function may be increasing the number of users who arrive at your site and immediately leave, in turn dropping your site in search rankings.

Using a content delivery network (CDN) can help videos and images load faster while a tool like Ahrefs’ SEO toolbar can spot broken links on a page so you can fix them quickly.

For even more tips on how to boost traffic to your site, check out HubSpot’s free website optimization course.

Tackling Traffic Slowdowns

Traffic drops may be slow-and-steady or sudden and substantive. In either case, however, they have the same result: Fewer visitors on your site and fewer opportunities for customer conversion.

To address these traffic issues, start by identifying the likely source, then consider potential issues tied to specific traffic mediums. Finally, take action to address common traffic concerns — with any luck, you’ll soon be back up to speed.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in January 2011 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Connecting with your audience on social media might seem as simple as a post and a follow, but it’s actually a lot more complex. Twitter as a marketing tool can apply to PR, thought leadership, brand building, and lead generation. Selling on Twitter takes some skill and practice, but it’s a viable platform for growing your business that is definitely worth the effort.

What can I sell on Twitter?

The short answer is: Anything! The great thing about social media marketing is that it can be used to sell such a wide variety of products. There’s a lot of business to be done on the internet across many channels. There is a niche somewhere on the web for anything you may have to sell. To tap into your niche and sell on Twitter like the pros do, follow these best practices.

The internet can be unpredictable, but there are some specific actions you can take to make sure you get a positive ROI from using Twitter. No sale is guaranteed, but utilizing some of these best practices will help you get the most out of Twitter as a tool for sales.

1. Interact with your audience.

Social media was created for people to be social, so don’t be shy! Respond to your mentions and retweets, do Q&A sessions, and be active with not just your followers but other relevant people in your industry. This helps build interest and trust that will encourage your audience to participate in the conversation, too.

2. Share things your market is interested in

Your stream of tweets shouldn’t only be about what you are selling. Users will be more likely to follow you if they see that you are sharing content they want to see and posts they can relate to. And the more eyes you can get on your profile, the more potential leads you’ll have.

3. Monitor your company’s reputation.

Keep track of what users are saying about your business online with routine social listening. Anytime you or your product is mentioned, check out what is being said so that you’re aware of how people are discussing it. Analyze the information for any helpful insight to improve what might be preventing leads from becoming customers.

4. Be consistent.

The Twitter algorithm favors users who tweet frequently and consistently. To help you do this, there are a lot of social media management tools that allow you to schedule posts in advance. This way, you don’t feel pressured to open the app everyday and think of something new and insightful to say. A scheduling app can keep your Tweets consistent, which means your leads will stay consistent, too.

5. Take feedback.

Don’t just watch what users are saying about your business or your product, actually listen. Customers who have had a negative or positive experience may voice their opinion on Twitter. Take the free feedback you would usually need to pay a focus group for and apply changes that can improve your sales.

6. Stay updated on industry news.

Stay on top of big (or small) changes in your industry by checking Twitter frequently. For example, if you heard that your competitor made a big announcement but you don’t know the details, search on Twitter for the competitor’s name to find out the latest news and what people have to say about it. Twitter’s real-time updates are great for getting wind of big news before it’s even published across the web. This upper hand will inform you of ways to gain more sales over the competition.

Social media has grown immensely as a business tool which means you will always be behind the competition if you’re not using it. In fact, Twitter’s monetizable daily active users (mDAU) amounts to 206 million people. That’s a ton of opportunities to sell on the platform. Some of those users could fall within your target audience. Unfortunately, a large following alone doesn’t guarantee sales, so use these tips to best take advantage of the platform for business revenue.

Using Twitter as a platform for selling your product can be really effective if you do it right. It’s not just about building a big following or promoting the most content. Focus on the following tips to improve your sales through Twitter.

1. Have a plan.

Don’t dive into selling on Twitter blindly. Create a strategy for Twitter marketing that works for you and your product and then execute it.

2. Determine which trends and hashtags will benefit you.

You don’t need to go viral in order to be seen, but you do need to put yourself in a position to be found. Following relevant popular trends and using hashtags will put your profile in front of the users that are seeking your content.

3. Build a great profile.

It’s easy to completely customize your Twitter profile with adjustments that fit your product. Even your “handle” doesn’t necessarily have to simply be the name of your business, it could be related to your product or your branding. And this also includes having a special pinned tweet that you want to call attention to as part of your profile.

4. Establish a personality.

Are your tweets going to be humorous? Serious? Lighthearted? Memes? Decide what you want users to see from your brand and how you want your Twitter profile to express it.

5. Connect with influencers or relevant followers.

Find people who are changemakers in your industry and keep up with them. Continuously check on what they are saying and decide what collaborations could benefit your business. For example, co-branding partnerships are a mutually beneficial offer you could make to another successful brand that you connect with on Twitter.

6. Mind your following to follower ratio.

Believe it or not, the myth that users care about your follow-back ratio is actually true. It’s a signal of the success of your account, so be more selective about which users you choose to follow.

7. Don’t be afraid of promotions.

Twitter ads are an awesome tool that you should take advantage of. They are a smart way to promote your brand and your product once you target the correct audience.

Use Twitter Effectively as a Selling Tool

Different social media platforms require different strategies to be effective. For instance, Twitter is focused on text while Instagram is focused on media. Consider the unique aspects of Twitter as a platform and use them to your advantage as you’re developing a strategy. Social media is an important tool for selling your product that can’t be ignored as you continue to grow your business.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in October 2009 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Marketing is an umbrella term for a wide variety of methods and strategies meant to benefit your business. Your business has different needs that will require different types of marketing efforts. For instance, engaging with your audience and improving sales are related, but still separate goals, so you can’t apply the exact same strategy for both. And if your need is to connect your business and product to other businesses, it will require business-to-business (B2B) marketing.

Growing and expanding your business will require a strong marketing plan. Running a business doesn’t require the exact same skillset as marketing a business. Many marketing professionals will specialize their focus on a specific sector, such as B2B marketing. These consultants or agencies utilize their specialization to help businesses improve their marketing strategies.

The Benefits of Hiring a Consultant

Focusing on a specialty has a lot of benefits compared to having surface-level knowledge of a general topic. Hiring a consultant will give you more time to focus on your business while they build you an effective marketing strategy. A consultant will also bring a fresh perspective and a new angle to your marketing. As well, they only have one role that they can dedicate their full time to. It’s also easier to teach one person your business needs and style versus a group.

How much does B2B consulting cost?

According to ZipRecruiter, the national average pay for a marketing consultant is $26 per hour. That may be a good starting point for you to configure your budget. Figuring out your budget will determine how much you can spend on a B2B consultant or agency. These marketing professionals may charge a fixed fee, invoice their materials and time spent later, or request a base fee with an added risk/reward element based on the achieved outcomes. For a longer project, they may ask for a monthly or annual retainer that guarantees them a fixed fee.

The Benefits of Hiring an Agency

Consultants may only offer strategy, planning, or execution, while an agency can accomplish all three. An agency may also be able to give you more individualized attention because they have more (wo)manpower. Hiring a marketing agency is especially necessary for businesses that don’t have a large in-house marketing division. Outsourcing the entirety of your B2B marketing efforts will take the burden off of you and your employees.

Choosing the right agency or consultant for your business will take some searching. Hiring the wrong marketing help could end up being a waste of resources and your budget if they end up not making progress toward any of your goals. Follow these steps to hire the best one for your business.

1. Define the outcomes you want to achieve.

There’s a reason why you’re seeking the help of a consultant or agency for your B2B marketing. Pinpoint what you want to be improved, whether that is improving something specific within your current marketing strategy or developing a brand new strategy. These goals should be structured in a way that allows them to be tracked so that you can monitor progress toward achieving them.

2. Decide whether you want an agency or a consultant.

The outcomes you previously defined will help determine whether you need an agency or a consultant. If you have a smaller budget and a more specific need, then a consultant would be a good choice. If you have a larger budget and a more broad need, you may do better with a consultant.

3. Choose a budget and stick to it.

When configuring a budget for your marketing efforts, don’t forget to weigh the risk versus the reward. If the reward that you stand to gain is substantial, then it may be fair to advocate a bit more of the budget to your B2B marketing efforts. Then, search for agencies or consultants within your budget.

4. Establish what specialties your hire should have.

Narrow the list even further by focusing on the professionals that have experience in your industry, ideally with exact B2B marketing experience in your industry. Use your desired outcomes to choose what work history and skill set your top candidates should have.

5. Create a shortlist.

Once you’ve found some candidates within your budget that have a skill set that aligns with your goals, you can start naming some to a shortlist. Choose candidates that you believe are worth interviewing that might be a good fit for the role.

6. Pick 10 insightful interview questions.

What do you really want to know about a potential B2B consultant or agency? Have they accomplished your specific needs for another organization in the past? Do they have creative ideas? Ask them about how they handled certain situations or what strategies they’ve developed with other businesses in the past.

7. Begin the partnership!

The most exciting part comes when you see one agency or consultant stand out among the rest and you can confidently choose them as your top pick. Get the paperwork written up and start the process! Confirm the goals of this partnership with your new hire and start working on your new B2B marketing plan.

Hire a B2B Marketing Consultant or Agency

Before you hire your B2B marketing agency or consultant, you should have set clear goals to accomplish with their help. After the decided strategy is implemented, continue tracking progress toward the desired outcomes. This will help you see how valuable or effective the help of the consultant or agency ended up being for your business. As well, ensure that any strategies or methods that were implemented for the long-term continue to be maintained if they are working well.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in February 2009 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.