Category Archives: B2B

One of the most frequent questions we get from aspiring and current inbound marketers is, “How do you manage all of that content?”

The answer: we rely on an editorial calendar in Google Calendar to stay keep our content organized.

There are a lot of great calendar tools out there you can choose from. In fact, for those of you who are HubSpot customers, there’s a marketing calendar built right into HubSpot’s software. But after trying a ton of other solutions, our team found that we really operated the best with just a simple Google Calendar. In fact, this has actually been the longest-running editorial calendar solution our team has ever seen.

Here’s how we set it up.

Follow Along With Free Editorial Calendar Templates

Download the Template for Free

1. Download HubSpot’s free editorial calendar templates.

First thing’s first: Download the calendar templates, above (they’re free.) By doing this, you’ll have three editorial calendar templates on your computer to use at your leisure: one for Google Calendar, one for Excel, and one for Google Sheets. In this blog post, we’ll be going over how to import the Excel template into Google Calendar.

2. Customize your template and prepare for import into Google Calendar.

By default, the publish dates on the templates you download will be stamped for the year 2016. Feel free to change them to the present year in the spreadsheet itself — you can also drag them to the dates of your choosing after you upload the file into Google Calendar.

Google Calendar makes it easy to load a calendar you might have pre-created in another program into Google. This includes Microsoft Excel. Here’s how to import the Excel calendar template you downloaded in the previous step into Google Calendar:

3. Open Google Calendar.

Once you’ve downloaded (or, for that matter, created) a calendar that opens in Microsoft Excel, it’s time to open Google Calendar. Just make sure you’re already logged into the Gmail account you want this calendar to give access to.

4. Use the lefthand dropdown menu to create a new calendar.

Now it’s time to set up your Google Calendar to accommodate the information in your Excel spreadsheet. First, go into your Google Calendar and click the plus sign to the right of “Other Calendars,” as shown in the screenshot below. In the dropdown menu that appears, select “Create new calendar.”

5. Fill out the details of your new calendar.

Fill out the fields that appear on the next screen. This includes a brief description of your calendar, as shown below, to give people proper context when you invite them into this calendar. When you’re done filling in the details, click “Create calendar.”

6. Import your XLS or CSV file from the same dropdown menu.

Using the same dropdown menu you used to create your editorial calendar, you’ll now import the Excel file itself into Google Calendar. Click that plus sign and select “Import.”

Click the upload box that reads “Select file from your computer,” and locate the file entitled “Blog Editorial Calendar – Excel” that was included in the ZIP file you downloaded in Step 1, above.

7. Select which calendar to add this file to.

In the second box below your imported file, click the “Add to calendar” dropdown. Be sure to choose the name of the calendar you just created from the dropdown menu, as shown below. Then, click “Import.”

8. Click Import.

Once you’ve uploaded your Excel file and selected the calendar you want to add this file to, click “Import.” You should see an Import calendar dialog box telling you that seven events were successfully imported. Click “Close.”

Now, if you didn’t change the dates of the first seven assignments in the original Excel document, you can now. Navigate to January 3, 2016, which is the start of your calendar. Be sure all of your other calendars are temporarily hidden by clicking the colored box to the left of the calendar name. On the week of January 3, 2016, you should just see one “Blog TBD” calendar event on each day from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m.

Use the edit window of each assignment to change the publish date. For example, if you’re satisfied with the 10 a.m. publish time, you can simply change the date from January X, 2016 to January X, 2021. Each assignment will then appear as event blocks in your 2021 monthly calendar view.

9. Determine your publishing schedule.

Now that you have your calendar created, it’s time to fill it in with assignments for the year. This is when you have to make some decisions about your blog’s publishing schedule.

While the Excel file you imported accounts for one blog post per day, this doesn’t mean you need to publish seven days a week. Maybe you want to publish every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Or perhaps you plan on publishing on just Thursdays. Remember, the key to successful blogging is quality over quantity.

Don’t overcommit to a blogging schedule if the quality of your content will take a hit. How often your company should blog will vary depending on your business goals and resources. 

If you decide to decrease the number of days you want to publish, click on the calendar event of that day and select “Delete.”

Even if you wanted to publish multiple times a day, updating this calendar is as easy as adding an event. Select a slot on your calendar to add another “Blog TBD” event and copy the default description from another one of the events you imported.

Next, it’s time for some minor adjustments. Currently, the “Blog TBD” events are set for 10 a.m. Feel free to move these events to whichever time your blog publishes during the day. 

10. Set up recurring events.

Now that you have your publish dates and times set, you can make these recurring events on your calendar. If you have a regular publishing schedule, like every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 10:00 a.m., then put that in as a recurring “slot” on your calendar. It’s okay if you don’t have a piece of completed content — or even a working title — to put there yet. It’s just a reminder that you want to publish something that day.

To add your recurring slot, click on your first “Blog TBD” event and click the pencil icon to edit your event. This will take you to the details of the post, where you can create a custom recurring schedule for each assignment, as shown in the screenshot below.

You can set the post up as a recurring post so it automatically appears every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 10:00 a.m. (or whatever days and times you want).

Once you’ve selected the recurring days, hit “Done” and “Save,” and you’ll have an editorial calendar framework to work with.

For now, keep the title of the event as “Blog TBD,” but feel free to customize the description with any extra details you want to be sure you include for each post. Wait to invite any guest, as we’ll use this to assign posts to an author once you begin filling in your topics. With everything complete, click “Save.”

If you don’t have a recurring schedule like this, you might not be in need of an editorial calendar just yet — but it is a good way to set goals for yourself. If you know you want to publish a certain number of posts each week, even if you don’t hit every single slot, it’s a good reminder for yourself and your team that this is something you should all be striving for.

11. Fill your publishing slots.

Now that you know all of the slots you want to fill, you gotta actually … you know … fill ’em. (If you don’t have topic ideas yet, check out this free topic idea generator. It’ll give you some good ideas for content to put in the calendar.)

Let’s say one of the posts you want to write is “10 Surprising Facts About Tapirs,” and one of the posts you’ve already written and want to publish later is “Think You’re Cut Out to Own a Tapir? Read This First.” Cool! Just add ’em both to the calendar by clicking on “Post – TBD” on the correct date, choosing “Edit Event,” and then changing the “Post – TBD” text to the actual title of the post.

Now, let’s say you don’t actually want to write “10 Surprising Facts About Tapirs,” and you want your colleague to write it instead. To assign the post an author, you’ll invite them to the event as a guest. To do this, click on the event, hit “Edit Event,” then invite that colleague to the post by typing his or her name or email address into the “Add guests” box, selecting “Add” when their name pops up, and hitting “Save” on the event once you’re done.

Now, anyone can see who is responsible for writing the post that’s going up in that time slot.

You can take it a step further by adding details to the “Description” box of the event, as shown in the large box in the screenshot above. You might include a quick synopsis, the keywords you plan to target the post for, the target audience you’re trying to reach, and the offer or CTA you will direct the reader to at the end of the post. Don’t forget a due date for the draft.

Before Google Calendar will let you save the event, you’ll see a dialog box asking if you would like to change just this event or all of the events in the series. Select “Only this event.”

Repeat these steps to assign each blog topic today and in the future.

12. Share your editorial calendar with others.

Now that you have your calendar set up, you can start to invite people to see it. I’d recommend you start with your immediate team and regular contributors — as well as anyone who regularly asks you about publishing content on your company blog.

To share this editorial calendar with people, simply find your editorial calendar under “My Calendars,” as shown below. Click the three dots next to the calendar name and then select “Settings and sharing” when it appears in the dropdown menu. You’ll be taken to the same screen we saw when you first filled out the details of your editorial calendar in Step 2.

Then, you can add in the names of people with whom you’d like to share the calendar and set the right permission levels for each invitee.

It’s wise to keep those with the permission settings to manage changes and sharing to a minimum so there aren’t too many cooks in the kitchen — but I recommend you let everyone see all event details so it’s clear exactly what content is going up in each slot.

Under the “Share with specific people” heading, enter the email addresses of those on your content team and decide if they have viewing, editing, or admin privileges. Save your updated settings.

Why Using Google Calendar as an Editorial Calendar Works

I mentioned earlier that we tried a lot of different editorial calendar solutions, and this is the only one that’s stuck for more than a couple of months. I think one reason for that is because we use Gmail for our corporate email, which means everyone on our team is already in Gmail (and their calendar, specifically) all day. As a result, it isn’t hard for people to form a habit of checking the editorial calendar, because it’s not difficult for them to find it.

Google Calendar also makes things really easy to move around and schedule because … well … it’s already a calendar. It has all the functionality you need to schedule stuff out and let the people who need to know about it know. When we were using other solutions for this, we were trying to hack a calendaring function instead of just relying on one that already existed.

Along those lines, adding people to view your calendar is simple, which makes it easy for multiple teams to collaborate, see what’s being published, and figure out when they might be able to launch content and campaigns.

Finally, this sets a precedent for other teams to coordinate with you in a really simple way. You can have a calendar for upcoming campaigns, offers, social media pushes, product launches — you name it. And you can all share those calendars with one another for a single-screen view of everything that’s going on so you can coordinate more easily.

Are there other solutions of there for maintaining an editorial calendar? Of course. But if you’re looking for a minimum viable product, and a free one at that, this ain’t too shabby. It’s kept our content team sane, agile, and transparent for quite some time — and I think it could do the same for you.

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

Imagine watching the Super Bowl without any commercials — or driving through a bustling city with blank billboards.

Now imagine watching YouTube without ads.

For some people, this is a reality. With YouTube Adblock, viewers can block ads from appearing in videos and on the webpage.

This begs the question: should video marketers worry about ad blocking?

Let’s learn more about YouTube Adblock, if consumers actually use it, and tips from real video marketers on how to get around them.

Ad blockers may feel like a marketer’s worst nightmare. But there is power in understanding why people use them.

Here are some quick stats: 48% of ad blocker users felt there were too many ads online. And 47% of users found these ads annoying or irrelevant.

Think of your own experience — have you ever been bombarded with pop-up ads while reading an article? Or watched a video ad that wasn’t relevant to your interests… at all?

This study signals a clear trend: Users want a less intrusive experience with digital ads. And they’re willing to guard their time and attention with ad blockers.

Do Consumers Use YouTube AdBlock?

We know the motivations behind using YouTube Adblock, but how many people actually use it? Take a look at HubSpot’s survey about ad blocker use on YouTube:

More than half (63%) of respondents do not use any type of ad blocking software on YouTube, whereas a slim 11% of respondents do.

Does this mean marketers can breathe a big sigh of relief? Not so fast.

While the adoption of ad blockers is low, it is slowly increasing year-over-year. It may not be an immediate threat to your digital marketing strategy, but this could change in the coming years.

And, if your target audience consists of millennials, you may feel the effects of ad blocking more. People in the 18-to-24 range are the highest users of ad block software, while people younger than 12, and 65 and older, are among the lowest.

Marketers must get creative to leverage YouTube without ad blockers getting in the way. Here are four tips from video marketers on how to get started.

4 Tips for Navigating YouTube AdBlock, According to Video Marketers

1. Keep it in perspective.

Don’t let the fear of ad blockers drive you away from YouTube entirely.

For Nicole Ondracek, marketing manager, paid advertising at HubSpot, advertising on YouTube still proves effective — even with pesky ad blockers.

“You’re still able to reach so many people on YouTube that [AdBlock] doesn’t really play a factor in our strategy.”

Ondracek adds, “For example, one of our audiences is a Custom affinity audience, which is a type of audience that targets people with interests in B2B CRM software. This segment alone can still reach 500 million to 1 billion impressions a week.”

While ad blockers “mute” a portion of your audience, YouTube still provides access to billions of users (2.1 billion to be exact), along with plenty of opportunities to reach them.

2. Diversify your ad channels.

It’s never a good idea to put all your eggs in one (marketing) basket.

For instance, if your digital marketing solely revolves around YouTube advertising, you may want to diversify your marketing strategy to include “ad blocker-proof” channels, such as social media or content marketing.

Jennifer Brault, channel promotions manager at HubSpot, tells me, “When running any sort of digital marketing campaign, it’s important to meet your audience where they are.”

Brault continues, “By diversifying your advertising spend across multiple channels, you’re not only reaching a variety of audiences, but you’re also learning more about what platforms your audience spends their time on, which can help inform future ad spend and organic efforts.”

3. Create a meaningful ad experience.

“Rather than trying to find ways around ad blockers, focus on finding ways to make advertising more meaningful and appealing to end users,” says Bernard May of National Positions.

As ad blocker usage slowly rises, video marketers must put their audience at the center of their video strategy. This means getting to the heart of customers’ interests, questions, and pain points — and then finding ways to address them.

Remember, consumers don’t hate advertising — they hate bad advertising.

4. Focus on targeting.

While we can’t necessarily get around ad blockers, we can focus on putting ads in front of the right people.

With Google AdWords (YouTube’s ad platform), video marketers can target people who already demonstrate an interest in specific topics or keywords relating to your business.

Affinity Audiences is an especially helpful targeting mechanism in Google Adwords. With Affinity Audiences, you can reach people based on their browsing history and place them in certain segments such as “bargain hunters” or “DIY.”

For example, a marketer selling outdoor sports equipment could target users who recently searched for “ice fishing” or “best hiking trails near me.”

Final Thoughts

Ad blocking technology isn’t going away soon. Fortunately, all isn’t lost for digital marketers who can still benefit from YouTube by auditing their current practices, diversifying their marketing channels, and identifying areas for innovation.

A conference website is a powerful way to generate buzz about your event, answer commonly asked questions, and boost ticket sales and attendance.

Since 2020, the majority of events have been hosted virtually — and this trend will likely continue in 2022 and beyond. In fact, the global virtual events industry is expected to grow 23.7% each year from 2021 to 2028, according to data from Grand View Research. 

In an increasingly digital-first world, a conference website is more important than ever. As many people’s first introduction to your event, it can influence whether someone buys a ticket, or abandons the page entirely. 

Below we’re going to explore over 20 of the coolest conference websites we’ve found. You can use these examples as inspiration when designing your own site.

Conference Website Design Best Practices

Before we dive into the examples we’ve collected, let’s explore some best practices to keep in mind when designing your own conference website.

A good conference website design should follow these best practices:

• Put your location and date above-the-fold: People should know immediately where, and when, your event is taking place. If they can’t find it easily, they could abandon your website. Before you dive into speakers or any other information, ensure your visitors know whether they can attend in the first place.
• Use interactive elements: Videos or animated graphics can go a long way towards making your website look sleek and professional. Plus, video is a good opportunity to showcase highlight reels from past events.
• Center the page around your visitor: What’s in it for them? Great speakers to inspire their work? A chance to network with industry leaders? Ensure your copy outlines — clearly and concisely — how your website visitor will benefit from your event.
• Have a clear call-to-action: Your page is ultimately meant to convert web visitors into event attendees — so make this easy to do. Create a bold “Register Here” or “Buy Tickets” button so your visitors can easily convert when they’re ready.
• Include fun visuals: One thing that’s apparent in all the conference web designs we chose is interesting, unique, fun visuals. Too much white space will likely bore visitors and not pique their interest enough to purchase a ticket. Use visuals to grab your visitor’s attention, and communicate through images what your event is all about.
• Create time-pressure by including a countdown feature: In a few of the websites we’ll look at below, you’ll see a countdown that outlines how many days, hours, or minutes visitors have left to sign up for the event. This is a fantastic way to create a sense of urgency and encourage visitors to sign up immediately — or risk missing out.
• Align with your brand identity: A conference is a great way to generate brand awareness to a much larger audience. With that goal in mind, you want to make sure your conference website aligns with your brand identity. Using the same or similar typography, color schemes, and logos can ensure you achieve a consistent look and feel across your marketing collateral. 

Now that we’ve covered some conference website best practices, let’s see how these 20+ conferences put those ideas into practice.

1. FloQast’s Take Control

Less than three months before Floqast’s annual user conference was scheduled to take place, it had to shift from in-person to virtual. Using CMS Hub, FloQast and its web design partner agency Aptitude8 was able to deliver a seamless conference experience and website.

FloQast’s Take Control conference website revamps its well-recognized green and navy blue colors in a unique color scheme, using brighter and more analogous colors. It also has two clear CTA buttons above-the-fold encouraging visitors to watch the event on demand. 

What we like: The website design is unique, but consistent with FloQast’s branding. 

Pro tip: Expand your color palette with analogous colors to provide your conference website with an enhanced look and feel. 

Great example of: Consistent brand identity

2. Leading Design Festival 

Color is an important factor to consider when designing any web page, and this homepage for the Leading Design Festival does a good job using complementary colors to evoke a sense of warmness. Additionally, you have everything you need at the top of the page — including a button to purchase tickets, the date of the festival, and what you’ll get for attending (a month of design leadership activities). This page proves that oftentimes, less is more.

What we like: This website clearly provides visitors with all the information they’re looking for about this year’s Leading Design Festival. 

Pro tip: Use one accent color to highlight important elements on the page, like the date of the conference and CTAs.

Great example of: Minimalist design

3. Canvas Conference 

To underscore the value of the Canvas Conference — insider stories from product people —  an image of people chatting and networking at a previous event serves as Canvas’ backdrop image for the 2021 conference homepage. Additionally, the page doesn’t shy away from bright, vibrant colors — like purples, greens, and blues — to attract the visitors’ attention.

Plus, the price is clearly stated front-and-center, which helps visitors know whether they can afford the event before exploring anything further.

What we like: Everything on Canvas Conference’s homepage — from the background image to the copy — emphasizes that the event is community-centric. 

Pro tip: Try to center your website around your event’s value proposition so everything from the layout to the copy is emphasizing the event’s benefits for attendees. 

Great example of: Copy that underscores the event’s value

4. UX Fest 

This scroll-triggered, interactive page is so fun, I scrolled it a few times. As you move down the page, you’re introduced to new information about the conference, with fun, unique design elements, like the “Stay Home and Level Up” image to the right of the first Conference box. Best of all, the page is incredibly simple, with plenty of blue space on either side, to evoke a sense of calmness as visitors learn about the conference.

What we like: UX Fest’s interactive website invites users to scroll and click on different CTAs to learn more about the speakers, masterclasses, and festival and purchase tickets.

Pro tip: Use animations and other interactive elements to guide the user down the page to the “Get Tickets” CTA button. 

Great example of: Interactive design

5. GOTOpia Chicago

One of the best features of this conference page is the “Early Bird Ends In…” countdown that appears above-the-fold as soon as a visitor enters the site. The sense of urgency encourages visitors to sign up immediately, or risk losing out on a good deal. The page also does a good job outlining all the critical information you need to know in just a few words — including “Engaging Talks”, “Keynotes”, and “Trivia + Happy Hours”.

Plus, who doesn’t love the bright vibrancy of a red-and-white color scheme?

What we like: The countdown timer shows how much time is left before early bird registration ends. It’s a subtle but effective way to generate ticket sales.

Pro tip: Use a countdown timer to encourage visitors to buy tickets as soon as possible, but keep the design simple and unobtrusive so it doesn’t seem overly promotional.

Great example of: Creating a sense of urgency

6. Consumer Technology Association

The CES conference page combines bold colors with interesting visuals to grab a visitor’s attention immediately, with a simple “Beyond the everyday” tagline. The page offers all necessary information, including date, location, and a CTA, from the very top of the page, ensuring CES-fans can sign up immediately.

What we like: Consumer Technology Association’s CES 2022 homepage provides users with an immediate event registration path. 

Pro tip: Make registering for your event as easy and quick as possible. 

Great example of: Signup flow

7. UX+ Conference

The UX+ Conference website is an excellent example of using interactive elements to engage and delight visitors. There’s a background animation and several text and hover animations that immediately grab visitors’ attention.

Combining past attendees’ testimonials with an animated speaker lineup, this is a powerful page that makes the most of its real estate to demonstrate why the UX+ Conference is a must-attend event for anyone in the UX industry.

What we like: The UX+ Conference home page uses interactive and visual elements to engage and impress the UX professionals visiting the site.

Pro tip: Create a website that will attract and delight your unique audience. 

Great example of: UX design

8. Chargebee User Conference

This sleek-looking homepage uses bold colors, typography, and animation to evoke a futuristic vibe. What I loved most about this conference website was the moving, interactive elements they’ve used to keep your interest as you scroll the page, including spinning visuals and continuously-moving text. This also reinforces the theme of the conference — “change is essential” — and its calls-to-action to adapt, evolve, and innovate.

Visit and scroll through the site yourself — it’s more entertaining than you might think.

What we like: Centered around the conference theme — “Change is essential” — Chargebee’s website is thoroughly dynamic and interactive.

Pro tip: Your theme should inform the color scheme, animations, CTAs, and every other part of your website design. 

Great example of: Theme-centric design

9. Circles Conference 

When attendees are choosing which conferences are worth their time and resources, one of the first questions they’ll ask is, “Why this conference over all others?”

This question is answered immediately on the Circles Conference homepage, and it’s answered using powerful, engaging text. For instance, the first sentence you’ll read in response to “Why Unmasked?” is “Shed layers of fear and doubt, and reveal your inner creativity” — convinced yet?

What we like: Circles Conference does an excellent job of persuading visitors to attend their 2022 event by clearly explaining this year’s theme and speaker lineup and displaying highlight reels from previous years and recordings of past sessions. 

Pro tip: Clearly explain why visitors should attend your specific event. 

Great example of: Answering “why this event?”

10. Collision Conference 

Seeing Seth Rogan at the top of the page is undoubtedly reason enough to pause on the site for anyone who’s a fan. Plus, “The Olympics of Tech”, a quote from Politico, does a good job demonstrating the value of the conference.

But what impressed me the most was the slider right below the hero image and “What Others Say” testimonials section. The slider displayed how many attendees, countries, startups, journalists, partners, and investors were represented in the event. For anyone whose unsure whether to attend, this is a compelling argument to not miss out.

What we like: Collision Conference uses a carousel slider to display impressive stats about its audience. 

Pro tip: Instead of telling website visitors how large your conference is, show them in terms of real numbers to persuade them that they can’t miss it.

Great example of: Creating FOMO

11. An Event Apart 

Consider standing out from the crowd by using in-house designs on your homepage, like An Event Apart does. The page is cheerful and colorful, and provides all critical information in only a few words. Before a visitor has even scrolled, they’ve learned where (online), when, and for whom the conference benefits.

For those that need more convincing, they can visit the “Why Attend?” page to see attendee testimonials (displayed as text messages), key reasons to attend, and answers to common objections.

What we like: An Event Apart clearly explains where, when, and who the event is for, and why UX and front-end designers should attend. 

Pro tip: Consider how to say more with less. 

Great example of: Concision

12. Startup Grind Global Conference 

Using a mixture of photography and unique design shapes works well in this case, and the bright purple, pink, and green colors you see at the top of the page contrasts well against a simple off-white backdrop. The page is sleek and uses three bold CTA buttons above the fold to provide all information a visitor will need to attend the event, either as a startup, “scale up” business, or individual attendee.  

What we like: Startup Grind Global Conference provides clear and distinct paths for different groups, including startups, scale-up businesses, and individuals, as soon as they land on the homepage.

Pro tip: Clearly explain how different segments of your audience can participate in your event. 

Great example of: CTAs

13. The Martech Summit Singapore 

If you’re hosting a conference in a unique or exciting location, consider using an image of that location as a compelling backdrop. In this case, The Martech Summit used an image of Singapore to remind website visitors of the other benefit they’ll get if traveling from another location for the conference — a trip to a vibrant city. Plus, the attendee count helps persuade hesitant buyers who likely don’t want to feel like they’re missing out.

What we like: The Martech Summit clearly emphasizes that its location is another benefit of attending the event. 

Pro tip: Identify what will excite attendees about your event and showcase it in your design and copy. 

Great example of: Emphasizing location as an event benefit

14. React Day New York 

First off — who doesn’t love hot dogs?

This React Day page does a great job using humor to stand out. Not only is there a big illustration of a hot dog — which hooked me immediately — but there are multiple mentions of hot dogs, including below Buy Tickets (“Psst: There will be hot dogs”), and used in response to “Why” to the right of the page.

What we like: Humorous illustrations and copy about hot dogs makes this conference website about a slightly intimidating topic — React — more accessible. 

Pro tip: Use humor on your own conference website to surprise and delight new audiences. 

Great example of: Humor

15. INBOUND

Okay, okay — I might be biased, but hear me out.

This INBOUND page does an excellent job of exciting visitors about INBOUND 2022, even thought INBOUND 2021 just happened. It shows a video outlining this year’s speakers to excite and impress visitors with the possibilities of similar popular speakers in 2022. This is a good idea if your conference has pulled in some big names in conferences’ past, to give visitors a sense for what they can expect at an upcoming conference if you haven’t officially released upcoming speakers.

The rest of the page also effectively outlines all necessary information, including prominent CTAs to view the 2021 Content Library and sign up for a newsletter to get the latest INBOUND announcements. 

What we like: HubSpot generates excitement for INBOUND every year by making past content and future announcements accessible to existing and prospective attendees.  

Pro tip: Add elements like a highlight reel, email opt-in form, and content library to get people exciting about next year’s event. 

Great example of: Generating excitement for an annual event

16. ProductCon 

One element that made this #ProductCon page, a conference held by the Product School, stand out to me was the easy-to-find “Get Free Ticket” box, which is front-and-center for new visitors. Particularly if your conference is online and free — which creates minimal barriers to entry — it’s a good idea to make it easy for prospects to sign up instantly.

What we like: Product School encourages prospective attendees to get their free tickets to #ProductCon as soon as they land on the homepage.

Pro tip: If pricing is a competitive differentiator of your conference, emphasize that in your design. 

Great example of: Emphasizing free admission as event benefit

17. NRF 2022: Retail’s Big Show

One of the cleaner, sleeker designs in this list, NRF’s Conference Website employs a bold background image and minimal text to simplify the user experience. You’ll find everything you need to know at the top of the page — including the theme of the conference, location, dates, and how to register.

If you need more convincing, then you can scroll to the “Why Attend NRF 2022” to learn four key reasons this event is so valuable for retailers and vendors to attend.

What we like: NRF’s conference is designed to “not just to help retail move forward, but speed ahead.” This idea is captured not only by the theme (“Accelerate”) and copy, but also by the graphics used throughout the website.

Pro tip: Pair powerful and concise language with visuals to tell new visitors what your conference is all about.

Great example of: Copy and visuals supporting the theme

18. AdWorld Conference

If you’re going to have some impressive companies attending or sponsoring your event — including Google, Facebook, and IBM — it’s a good idea to showcase them on your conference’s homepage, like AdWorld does in the example above. Plus, what really stands out about this example is the small videos of various speakers that move across the page, creating a dynamic and unique experience.

What we like: AdWorld Conference showcases its speakers in a completely unique way, displaying video thumbnails of speakers moving across the screen. 

Pro tip: Re-think how to display common sections of a conference website — like the speaker line-up or agenda — to create a unique user experience.

Great example of: Showcasing speakers

19. Growth Marketing Summit

One element I appreciated about this page was the clear, “No Risk. Order Can Be Cancelled Free of Charge…” text right below the CTA, which helps dissuade any visitors’ concerns over being unable to attend and losing money. The page effectively leverages bright colors and a futuristic-looking heart to grab visitors’ attention from the get-go.

What we like: Objection handling is a common term in the sales world and applies to conferences as well. The Growth Marketing Summit anticipates and resolves one common objection of prospective attendees — non-refundable tickets — immediately on the homepage. 

Pro tip: Identify and alleviate common concerns of your prospective attendees on your homepage. 

Great example of: Objection handling

20. Design Thinkers

Design Thinkers begins its DesignRethinkers conference home page with a fun, interactive section. If you click inside the hero image banner, you can add sticker elements to change words like “Define” and “Consider” to “Redefine” and “Reconsider.” The homepage is modern yet retro-looking, particularly with the black-and-white images and what looks like scrapbook materials in the corner. The unique combination of muted and neon colors also helps. 

What we like: Users are invited to re-examine and re-work parts of the website design by clicking and hovering over different elements on the page. 

Pro tip: Invite users to engage with your site by clicking on CTA buttons and other design elements, scrolling, and more.  

Great example of: User-centric design

21. From Business to Buttons

Since From Business to Buttons took place in a never-seen before digital platform, their website design had to strike a balance between distinctive and familiar. The website, which reminded me a little bit of a carnival ride, uses bright colors and an unusual typography to stand out. The page is fun and unique, and has a clean navigation menu at the top to help visitors find exactly what they’re looking for.

What we like: The website design is unusual but still user-friendly. 

Pro tip: Pair non-traditional typography and image overlays with traditional navigation menus and links to make your website one-of-a-kind but still easy to navigate and use. 

Great example of: Unique design to reflect uniqueness of event

22. Red Hat Summit

We round out this list with an incredibly simple yet sleek page from Red Hat Summit, which states the theme — “Open Your Perspective” — and a brief summary of the conference above-the-fold. The use of white space and minimal design elements helps to highlight this minimal copy, which piqued my interest in the conference. Plus, the “Register” button is clear and easy-to-find.

What we like: Red Hat Summit’s theme, “Open your perspective,” informs every part of the design, from the logo to the layout to the use of whitespace. 

Pro tip: Reflect your conference theme in your website’s design. 

Great example of: Conference logo

Conference Website Templates

Ready to create your own?

Fortunately, there are plenty of templates available to help you craft a compelling conference website.

1. WordPress Conference Templates

If your website is hosted on WordPress, for instance, you can use one of WordPress’s themes to create an inspiring, sleek, professional website to attract and convert event attendees.

Best of all, you can start with a pre-designed theme, and then use WordPress’s easy website builder to add unique features to make your conference stand out. WordPress offers a free version, and the Business plan is $25/month.  

Take a look at 21 Best Conference WordPress Themes of 2021 for more WordPress theme inspiration.

2. Wix Conference Templates 

Another great option is Wix, which has a large compilation of clean, interactive conferences and meetups website templates. Wix has a free option available, and the Professional version is relatively inexpensive at just $23/month.  

You can also edit your site for mobile, ensuring your mobile site visitors will want to attend your conference just as much as your desktop visitors.

3. Canva Conference Templates

Finally, take a look at Canva’s conference and event program templates. Canva is incredibly easy-to-use, with drag-and-drop features, color schemes, and high-quality stock photos, illustrations, and graphics.

Best of all, if you’re designing with your team, you can easily share your editable file from Canva and then place your colleagues’ suggestions right into Canva.

Building Your Conference Website

And there you have it! Now you’re ready to begin creating your own conference website to attract visitors and increase attendees to your own branded event. Who knows — maybe your company will make it on this list in the future. Good luck! 

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

Did you know that it takes 5 to 7 impressions for people to remember a brand? With branding, the goal is to continue making those positive impressions on an ongoing basis. One way to do that is through brand activations.

In this post, we’ll dive into what brand activations are, how to strategically plan a brand activation, and give you some ideas to inspire your own branding events.

While a brand activation is a singular event or campaign that is meant to elevate your brand it shouldn’t be confused with ongoing brand strategy. So, what does brand activation strategy look like? Let’s dive in now.

Brand Activation Strategy

Before you get started with planning different brand activation events, it’s important to understand the goal of each separate campaign.

The best way to plan a strategy is to identify your goals. It could be customer acquisition, user sign-ups, social media engagement, etc. Ultimately you’ll want to increase brand awareness, however, narrowing down your goal, even more, will make it measurable and attainable (hello SMART goals).

Once you know your goals, you can begin brainstorming various brand activation events or campaigns that you can do to achieve your goals.

For instance, let’s say your goal is user sign-ups. One brand activation for that goal could be going to a trade show. There you can talk to potential customers and then hopefully sign up users on the spot (depending on your offerings).

Once you have a list of ideas, goals, and metrics, it’s time to begin your brand activation plan. You should decide on one campaign or event to move forward, plan the logistics of that event, and use your brand playbook (with a clear vision, value propositions for key targets, brand personality, character, voice, and experiences). Keep in mind that brand activations don’t necessarily need to be events, but can be sampling campaigns, social media contests, or other digital marketing campaigns.

Now, let’s go over some ideas to help you come up with your own brand activation plan. Below, we’ll have the ideas separated by the goal to give you an idea of how to strategically brainstorm brand activations.

Brand Activation Ideas

Goal: User sign ups

• Experiential marketing event
• Trade show
• Digital marketing campaigns

Goal: Increased impressions/brand awareness

• Sampling campaign (giveaways)
• In-store/virtual events
• Digital marketing campaigns
• Influencer marketing

Goal: Customer acquisition

• Digital marketing campaigns like PPC, display advertising, etc.
• Interactive events
• Live demonstrations

Goal: Social media engagement

• Social media contest
• Social media movement
• Behind-the-Scenes series
• Influencer marketing

Now that we have some ideas, let’s look at some examples of brands that have run excellent brand activation events.

Brand Activation Examples

1. Vitamin Water | Brandon

Image Source

A colleague, Clifford Chi, uses this as a great example of brand activations. He usually doesn’t pay much attention to subway ads, but Vitamin Water’s “Brandon” was so funny, it made him laugh out loud. Then, a few weeks later, when Chi was walking around Boston, he strolled past Forbes’ Under 30 Summit and saw someone holding a sign that said, “Need Handshaking Tips?”.

That person was a part of Vitamin Water’s “Brandon” marketing campaign. There were also other members of the campaign, handing out Brandon’s business cards, some swag, and even bottles of Vitamin Water.

The funniest (and most impressive) part of the “Brandon” marketing campaign, though, was that the members acted like they actually worked for Brandon.

Vitamin Water’s “Brandon” campaign resonated with so many people because instead of just giving subway riders a quick laugh on their way to work, they made the extra effort to interact with their target audience and bring the ad to life. To make things even more personal, Brandon accepts all of his LinkedIn requests.

2. Revolve | Revolve Festival

Image Source

An excellent example of brand activation is the Revolve Festival that Revolve holds at Coachella each year (or at least has for several consecutive years). This is often known as the celebrity party of the year.

Revolve hand picks celebrities and influencers (macro or micro) to party while the music festival is occuring.

Revolve Fest trends on social media almost each year it happens because of the influencer marketing that the company focuses on. Influencer marketing helps the company bring in sales for its clothing line and more. In fact, influencers drive 70% of sales for the company.

Each of these festivals is a brand activation to bring in sales and drive awareness for the brand.

3. HBO | SXSWestworld

To promote the second season of their hit show Westworld, HBO built a miniature replica of the show’s Wild-West-themed amusement park in Austin, Texas for attendees of SXSW 2018 to explore.

With over 40 “hosts” who guided attendees on their own unique narrative within Sweetwater, the attendees felt like they were actually in an episode of Westworld, traversing a town full of trotting horses, troublemaking bandits, and money-hungry gamblers.

The park also contained clues of season two’s storyline and new characters, which helped generate a ton of suspense and anticipation for its upcoming premiere.

4. HubSpot | INBOUND

Each year HubSpot holds the INBOUND event. This brand activation is a way to drive brand awareness, customer sign ups, and ultimately help our customers in whatever way we can as a company.

INBOUND is an excellent example of brand activation because it’s a singular event each year that drives engagement and interactivity for HubSpot.

With INBOUND, we can provide an experience for our customers and any business that wants to learn from the best of the best.

5. Netflix | Altered Carbon at CES

At CES 2018, Netflix designed one of the most popular booths at the event. But it didn’t showcase the inner workings of their recommendations algorithm or their process for green-lighting shows. It actually spotlighted a concept their show Altered Carbon revolves around — immortality.

In their booth, fictional employees from Psychasec, the company that offers transfers of their clients’ consciousness to new bodies, or “sleeves”, in Altered Carbon, pitched the benefits of their service and even displayed some models of their sleeves.

Netflix deeply immersed CES’ attendees in the narrative of their hit sci-fi show, and it made them feel like they could actually live forever — if only Psychasec’s service was real.

6. CALM | Project 84

In the U.K., suicide is the number one cause of death of men aged 18 – 45. CALM, a suicide prevention charity, decided to spread awareness for the issue by creating 84 life-size sculptures of hooded men, which is the number of men who take their own lives every week in the U.K. and placing them on top of one of U.K.’s top TV network’s building.

Every sculpture is unique and tells the story of a real person who committed suicide. And to produce as much publicity for male suicide prevention as possible, ITV, the TV network CALM partnered with, agreed to air the campaign on their morning show and dedicate three days of programming to male suicide. The campaign also promoted a petition that urges the government to take suicide more seriously and take greater action to help solve the urgent issue.

Brand Activation Takeaways

Putting on a brand activation event or campaign can help you increase brand awareness, impressions, and ultimately bring in new customers. With tactics like experiential marketing, digital campaigns, influencer marketing, and in-person or virtual events, you can engage and interact with your audience in a personal way.

To succeed with brand activation, it’s important to focus on your audience, make your experiences shareable, and be creative.

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

Whether you’re just starting out with content marketing or you’ve been using the same approach for a while, it never hurts to revisit your content strategy plan and make sure it’s up-to-date, innovative, and engaging for your prospects and customers – no matter when or how they intend to buy.

If you’re having trouble planning for the upcoming year or need some fresh ideas to include in your plan, read on.

In this post, we’ll dive into what content strategy is, why your business needs a content marketing plan, and what steps you need to take to create your strategy. Plus, we’ll explore some examples of effective content marketing strategies for inspiration.

Say your business goals include increasing brand awareness. To achieve this, you might implement a content strategy that focuses on SEO to increase your website’s visibility on the search engine results pages (SERPs) and drive traffic to your products or services.

New business owners might assume a content strategy is a nice-to-have, but not necessary early on. However, producing high-quality content can be invaluable in building trust with new audiences and succeeding in the long haul.

In essence, a good content strategy is the foundation of your Attract and Delight stages in a buyer’s journey that follows the inbound marketing framework. Along with attracting prospects to your brand, you can leverage a content strategy for sales enablement and customer satisfaction.

Plus, with 70% of marketers actively investing in content marketing, it’s critical that you develop a good content strategy to compete in your industry.

When you develop a content strategy, there are a few questions to answer. Let’s dive into those, now.

1. Who will be reading your content?

Who’s the target audience for your content? For how many audiences are you creating content?

Just as your business might have more than one type of customer, your content strategy can cater to more than one type of user.

Using a variety of content types and channels will help you deliver content that’s tailored to each persona.

2. What problem will you be solving for your audience(s)?

Ideally, your product or service solves a problem you know your audience has. By the same token, your content coaches and educates your audience through this problem as they begin to identify and address it.

A sound content strategy supports people on both sides of your product: those who are still figuring out what their main challenges are, and those who are already using your product to overcome these challenges.

Your content reinforces the solution(s) you’re offering and helps you build credibility with your target audience.

3. What makes you unique?

Your competitors likely have a similar product as yours, which means your potential customers need to know what makes yours better — or, at least, different.

Maybe your main asset is that your company has been established for many years. Or perhaps you have a unique brand voice that makes you stand out from your competitors.

To prove why you’re worth buying from, you need to prove why you’re worth listening to. Once you figure that out, permeate that message in your content.

4. What content formats will you focus on?

To figure out what formats to focus on, you need to meet your audience where they are.

While you may to tempted to launch a podcast since it’s grown so much in the last few years, or launch a YouTube channel, find out first where your audience lives.

Otherwise, you may waste time creating content that either won’t reach your audience or capture their attention.

Once you identify the best formats, start creating a budget to assess what resources you can allocate to execute this strategy.

5. What channels will you publish on?

Just as you can create content in different formats, you’ll also have various channels you can publish to, from your website to social media.

This, again, will reflect where your audience lives. If your audience prefers long-form video content, you may opt to publish your content on YouTube. If you have a younger audience that likes quick content, you may opt for TikTok and Instagram.

We’ll talk more about social media content strategy in the step-by-step guide later in this article.

6. How will you manage content creation and publication?

Figuring out how you’ll create and publish all your content can be a daunting task.

Before you execute, it’s important to establish:

• Who’s creating what.
• Where it’s being published.
• When it’s going live.

In a small team, this may be easy enough as you may be the sole decision-maker. As your company grows, you may need to collaborate with several content teams to figure out an effective process.

Today’s content strategies prevent clutter by managing content from a topic standpoint — as explained in the video above. When planning a content editorial calendar around topics, you can easily visualize your company’s message and assert yourself as an authority in your market over time.

Why Marketers Need to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing helps businesses prepare and plan for reliable and cost-effective sources of website traffic and new leads.

If you can create just one blog post that gets a steady amount of organic traffic, an embedded link to an e-book or free tool will continue generating leads for you as time goes on — long after you click “Publish.”

HubSpot’s blog team found this to be key to increasing traffic to the Sales Blog over time – read about our blog strategy here.

The reliable source of traffic and leads from your evergreen content will give you the flexibility to experiment with other marketing tactics to generate revenue, such as sponsored content, social media advertising, and distributed content.

Plus, your content won’t just help attract leads, it will also educate your prospects and generate awareness for your brand.

Now, let’s dive in to learn the specifics of how to create a content marketing plan. Curious how our former HubSpot Head of Content SEO Aja Frost put together our content strategy? Here it is.

1. Define your goal.

What’s your aim for developing a content marketing plan? Why do you want to produce content and create a content marketing plan?

Know your goals before you begin planning, and you’ll have an easier time determining what’s best for your strategy.

Download this goal planning template for help figuring out the right content goals.

2. Conduct persona research.

To develop a successful plan, you need to clearly define your content’s target audience — also known as your buyer persona.

This is especially important for those who are starting out or are new to marketing. By knowing your target audience, you can produce more relevant and valuable content that they’ll want to read and convert on.

If you’re an experienced marketer, your target may have changed. Do you want to target a new group of people or expand your current target market? Do you want to keep the same target audience? Revisiting your audience parameters by conducting market research each year is crucial to growing your audience.

Featured Tool: Buyer Persona Generator

3. Run a content audit.

Early on, most brands start with blog posts. If you want to venture out into different formats, you can run a content audit to assess your top-performing and lowest-performing content. Then, use that information to inform which direction you take next.

If you’ve been in business for a while, you should review your content marketing efforts and the results from it in the last year.

Figure out what you can do differently in the upcoming year and set new goals. Now is a great time to align your team’s goals with the rest of your organization’s goals.

Whatever stage you’re in, a content audit will help you determine what resonates best with your audience, identify gaps in your topic clusters, and brainstorm fresh content ideas.

4. Choose a content management system.

A few vital parts of content management include content creation, content publication, and content analytics.

You want to invest in a CMS to create, manage, and track your content in an easy and sustainable way.

With the HubSpot CMS, you can plan, produce, publish, and measure your results all in one place.

Another popular CMS is WordPress, to which you can add the HubSpot WordPress plugin for free web forms, live chat, CRM access, email marketing, and analytics.

5. Determine which type of content you want to create.

There are a variety of options out there for content you can create, from written content like ebooks and blog posts to audio content like podcasts.

In the next section, we’ll discuss some of the most popular content formats marketers are creating, including some tools and templates to get you started.

6. Brainstorm content ideas.

Now, it’s time to start coming up with ideas for your next content project.

Here are some tools to get the juices flowing.

1. Feedly

The Feedly RSS feed is a wonderful way to track trendy topics in your industry and find content ideas at the same time.

You start by telling the software what topics you’re most interested in and its AI tool will do the rest.

You won’t need to scour the internet to find new content ideas anymore. Instead, you can go through your curated list, compiled from news sites, newsletters, and social media. 

2. BuzzSumo

Want to discover popular content and content ideas? This company offers a number of market research tools, one of which uses social media shares to determine if a piece of content is popular and well-liked.

This information helps you see which content ideas would do well if you were to create content about them.

3. BlogAbout

Get your mind gears going with IMPACT’s blog title generator. This tool works a bit like Mad Libs, but instead of joke sentences, it shows you common headline formats with blanks where you can fill in the subject you have in mind.

This brainstorming technique helps you put general ideas in contexts that would be appealing to your target audience. Once you have a headline you like, BlogAbout lets you add it to your “Notebook” so you can save your best ideas.

4. CoSchedule Headline Analyzer

You can get blog post ideas for an entire year with HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator. All you need to do is enter general topics or terms you’d like to write about, and this content idea generator does all the work for you.

This tool analyzes headlines and titles and provides feedback on length, word choice, grammar, and keyword search volume.

If you have an idea in mind, run a few title options through the Headline Analyzer to see how you could make it stronger, and to move your idea further along in the brainstorming process.

5. HubSpot’s Website Grader

This is a great tool to use when you want to see where you’re at with your website and SEO efforts. The Website Grader grades you on vital areas of your website performance and sends you a detailed report to help you optimize.

With this tool, you can figure out how to make your website more SEO-friendly and discover areas of improvement.

7. Publish and manage your content.

Your marketing plan should go beyond the types of content you’ll create – it should also cover you’ll organize your content.

With the help of an editorial calendar, you’ll be on the right track for publishing a well-balanced and diverse content library on your website. Then, create a social media content calendar to promote and manage your content on other sites.

Featured Tool: Free Editorial Calendar Templates

Download for Free

Many of the ideas you think of will be evergreen (i.e.: just as relevant months or years from now as they are today). That being said, you shouldn’t ignore timely topics either. While they may not be the bulk of your editorial calendar, they can help you generate spikes of traffic.

Most people count on incorporating popular holidays, like New Year’s, in their marketing efforts, but you don’t have to limit yourself to these important marketing dates.

If there are niche holidays that might appeal to your audience, it could be worth publishing content on your blog or on social media. Check out this ultimate list of social media holidays — keep an eye on it when you’re planning your calendar.

Content Marketing Strategy Templates and Examples

To understand what a content strategy is, let’s explore some examples of real-life content strategies based on a few various business goals.

Let’s start with Evernote, a note-taking app, that developed an SEO-driven content strategy to attract new prospects to their website.

I’m a huge fan of Evernote’s blog, which offers a wealth of knowledge around the topic of productivity. The blog post, How To Stay Disciplined When Times Are Tough, made me laugh out loud – and incentivized me to grab a pen and write down some of the tips I liked best.

But why is a company that sells a note-taking app writing about discipline?

Because it’s how I found their website when I searched “How to stay disciplined” on Google.

People interested in reading content related to productivity are likely the same people interested in downloading Evernote’s note-taking product.

On the contrary, if Evernote’s marketing team simply created content for the sake of increasing traffic – like publishing “Our 10 Favorite Beyonce Songs” – it wouldn’t be considered a content strategy at all, it would just be content.

A strategy needs to align content with business goals. In Evernote’s case, the strategy aligns content (blog posts on productivity) with the business goal of attracting leads (people interested in note-taking) to their site.

Let’s take a look at another example to see how a good content strategy can help businesses with sales enablement.

Consider the following scenario: A prospect calls a sales representative at Wistia and asks questions related to Wistia’s video hosting service. As the Wistia sales rep speaks with her, he learns her business is using a few other tools to convert leads into sales, including Intercom.

Bingo.

Once the call ends, the sales rep sends the prospect a follow-up email with a blog post about Wistia’s integration with Intercom, which enables Intercom users to further personalize messages to prospects based on video-watching data they collect through Wistia.

This is a prime example of how you might use a content strategy as a sales enablement tool.

On the surface, it might seem odd that Wistia has dedicated content regarding another business’ tool. However, this content is a great resource for Wistia’s sales team, particularly when prospects have concerns regarding how Wistia’s product can integrate with their existing software or processes.

Now that we’ve explored a few examples of content strategies, let’s dive into the types of content marketing assets you can develop.

These are the eight most popular types of content marketing you can create for your readers and customers.

1. Blog Posts

If you haven’t already noticed, you’re currently reading a blog post. Blog posts live on a website and should be published regularly in order to attract new visitors.

Posts should provide valuable content for your audience that makes them inclined to share posts on social media and across other websites.

We recommend that blog posts be between 1,000 and 2,000 words in length, but you should experiment to see if your audience prefers longer or shorter reads.

Featured Tool: 6 Free Blog Post Templates

Check out our free blog post templates for writing great how-to, listicle, curation, SlideShare presentation, and newsjacking posts on your own blog.

2. Ebooks

Ebooks are lead generation tools that website visitors download after submitting a lead form with their contact information. They’re typically longer, more in-depth, and published less frequently than blog posts, which are written to attract visitors to a website.

But ebooks aren’t only effective for the top of the funnel.

As Nora Leary, Growth Director at Ironpaper, Inc., notes, “Ebooks serve different purposes at varying stages in the buyer’s journey.”

She told me, “Awareness-level ebooks help educate the prospect about a certain pain point and are an excellent lead capture tool. The content should remain introductory and informational.”

Leary adds, “Ebooks can convert leads in the funnel by offering them useful tools as prospects consider their needs more in-depth. An ebook here might dive deeper into a particular problem and solution options and include templates or calculators.

[Lastly,] ebooks further down the funnel should become more personalized and offer more sales content. Comparison guides or an ebook of case studies are beneficial for prospects at this stage.”

Ebooks are the next step in the inbound marketing process: After reading a blog post. such as this one, visitors might want more information.

This is where calls-to-action (CTAs) come into play, directing people to a landing page where they can submit their contact information and download an ebook to learn more valuable information for their business. In turn, the business producing the ebook has a new lead for the sales team to contact.

Featured Tool: 18 Free Ebook Templates

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3. Case Studies

A case study allows you to tell a customer story and build credibility in the process.

A case study is perhaps your most versatile type of content marketing because it can take many different forms — some of which are on this list. That’s right, case studies can take the form of a blog post, ebook, podcast, even an infographic.

The goal is to demonstrate how your product helped real-life companies succeed. Before choosing a customer for a case study, you should determine to which business area you’re trying to drive value.

Featured Tool: 3 Free Case Study Templates

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4. Templates

Templates are effective content marketing examples to try because they generate leads while offering tremendous value to your audience.

When you provide your audience with template tools to save them time and help them succeed, they’re more likely to engage with your content in the future.

5. Infographics

Infographics can organize and visualize data in a more compelling way than words alone.

These are great content formats to use if you’re trying to share a lot of data in a way that is clear and easy to understand.

Featured Tool: 15 Free Infographic Templates

If you’re ready to get started, get our templates for creating beautiful infographics in less than an hour.

6. Videos

Videos are a highly engaging content medium and are shareable across social media platforms and websites alike.

Videos require a bigger investment of time and resources than written content, but as visual content continues to offer big ROI, it’s a medium worth exploring.

Featured Tool: Free Video Marketing Starter Pack + Templates

Download for Free

7. Podcasts

Starting a podcast will help audiences find your brand if they don’t have time or interest in reading content every day.

The number of podcast listeners is growing — in 2021, there was a 10% year-over-year increase in U.S. podcast listeners.

If you have interesting people to interview or conversations to host, consider podcasting as another content format to experiment with.

Featured Tool: How to Start a Podcast [Guide + Templates]

Download for Free

8. Social Media

Once you’ve been regularly publishing content on your own site for a while, start thinking about a social media strategy to distribute your content on social media.

In addition to sharing your content, you can also repurpose it into new formats and create original content specifically for each platform.

Posting on social media is pivotal to amplifying your brand’s reach and delivering your content to your customers where you know they spend their time. Popular social networks include:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• Snapchat
• YouTube

When launching a business account on any of the social networks above, adjust your content to the platform.

On Instagram, for example, users want aesthetically pleasing visuals. With feeds, IGTV, Stories, you have a lot of room to play with. TikTok, on the other hand, appeals to a younger demographic that wants trendy, funny, and creative short-form video.

Do some market research to discover which platforms your buyers are on, and mold your content to their expectations.

It takes time, organization, and creativity to grow a successful content marketing strategy. From building the foundation of your content marketing plan to adding tools to better manage your content, setting up your strategy for the new year won’t be a hassle if you follow the steps and explore the resources here.

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

As email marketers, one of the key metrics we use to determine if our audience is actually reading our content is the open rate.

Tracking email opens allows us to determine whether our subject lines are resonating with our audience. If we can’t get them to open an email, we can’t get them to click and move further along the buyer’s journey.

With the rollout of Apple iOS 15’s new privacy protection features, our open rates are in jeopardy. But is that a bad thing?

Let’s start with some information about how this new feature will work.

How Apple’s Email Privacy Protection Feature Works

After updating an iOS device to iOS 15, upon opening the Apple Mail app you will see a popup asking whether you’d like to “Protect Mail activity.”

If you select the “Protect Mail activity” option, Apple will first route your emails through a proxy server to pre-load message content, including tracking pixels, before it makes it to your inbox.

What does that mean for you?

According to Apple, “Mail Privacy Protection hides your IP address, so senders can’t link it to your other online activity or determine your location. And it prevents senders from seeing if and when you’ve opened their email.”

What does this mean for email marketers?

Mail privacy protection affects any email opened from the Apple Mail app on any device, no matter which email service is used such as Gmail or a work address. However, this will not affect other email apps used on Apple devices like the Gmail app on an iPhone for example.

If you’re an email marketer, you might still be wondering how this change will impact your strategy. To help, we decided to highlight the steps our email team is taking to adjust our strategy and process around these email privacy protection features.

Here are a few of the steps we’re taking and we encourage you to join us

How HubSpot Email Marketers Are Responding to iOS 15

1. Take stock of current processes.

Before Apple’s iOS 15 changes went live, we audited all of our existing email programs.

To begin, we wanted to understand the potential impact this change was going to have on the business. Using HubSpot’s email reporting tools we were able to assess the portion of our database that uses Apple Mail clients. Understanding this number is important to gauge how big of an impact these IOS changes will have on our ability to see accurate email performance data moving forward.

Next, we documented which subject lines resonate best with each of our personas.

While we follow email subject line best practices, as most email marketers know that only gets you so far. Things like character count and action-oriented language are only guardrails used to guide our subject line writing. From there we’ve experimented heavily with language, structure, and yes — even emojis — to find what resonates with each of our personas.

This documentation provides my team with a library of subject lines and guardrails that we can use moving forward in a world without accurate Open Data.

Finally, we documented email benchmarks for all of our programs. While the privacy update will only impact Opens, that means all other metrics utilizing open data will be impacted too — such as clickthrough rate which is measured by total clicks/total opens. These benchmarks will enable us to measure the impact that this IOS change will have across all of our email metrics.

2. Open up email reporting.

When reporting on email performance one of the first metrics considered is open rate. How successful were we at getting our recipients to open our email? Well, that’s about to change.

Email marketers are going to have to shift their focus to stable metrics like clicks, click rate (clicks / delivered emails), and conversion rate moving forward. This is our plan.

While this change may be painful, we believe it’s the right course of action. Looking at clicks and conversions is much more closely tied to how your database is engaging with your email programs.

Driving action via a CTA click and the following conversion is the ultimate goal of most emails sent today. Focussing on clicks and conversions will enable marketers to better optimize their programs to drive real engagement for their database.

However, open rates will not be going away. They will just be — different. It will still be important to track open rates over time for your email programs. We will need to establish new benchmarks after the IOS update is rolled out broadly. From there we will still be able to do subject line testing and see if we can improve Open rates over the new benchmark.

3. Stay the (automated) course.

While a few things are changing for us in how we think about reporting and subject line experimentation, our overarching strategy doesn’t follow suit.

At HubSpot, we’ve never relied on open data to segment or personalize our automated email programs. I know this goes against the tried and true drip campaign logic, which relies heavily on whether a contact opened an email. We instead focus our segmentation and personalization on the behaviors our contacts are taking on our website and within our app.

We’ve found this behavioral segmentation to be the most successful when trying to connect with our audience.

Take our email onboarding experience for example.

We have a welcome email that we send to every contact when they sign up for HubSpot that is filled with getting started resources.

The next email contacts receive is not based on how they interacted with our welcome email but rather how they have interacted with our product. Depending on the tools they have (or haven’t) used, we will send them a personalized email suggesting the next tool to explore.

We will stay the course here and focus on behavior over email interaction.

4. Understand the impact on your strategies.

According to Litmus, if Apple Mail audiences opt into Mail Privacy Protection, marketers could face the following issues:

• Any audience cohort, segmentation, or targeting based on the last open date would be rendered useless — especially critical for purging unengaged contacts.
• Automated flows and journeys that rely on someone opening an email would need to get re-engineered.
• A/B testing subject lines (or anything else) using opens to determine the winner or to automatically send out the winner won’t work anymore.
• Send time optimization would become inaccurate.
• Countdown timers might show outdated times as the cached version was pulled at email send time — not opened time.
• Other content powered by opens such as local weather or nearest store location also wouldn’t be accurate.
• Some interactive emails that reference external CSS might not work.

5. Weigh alternatives.

Although some elements of email marketing will be more challenging with IOS 15 in play, marketers can still use some creative alternatives to continue to send subscribers interesting and engaging content.

For example, although you might not be able to optimize for send time as well without proper open-tracking, you can still manually analyze email performance based on send time, or send emails based on send times that receive the best global performance across industries.

Additionally, while you might not be able to automate location-specific banners or weather reports for Apple users, you can still use zip code information that they’ve submitted on previous forms to send them location-based content.

While these alternatives might not be perfect or easy to streamline with automation, they can still give your audiences a somewhat personalized email experience.

6. Explore additional tools.

While HubSpot’s product team is continuing to watch and respond to how iOS 15 impacts email marketing tools, there are also additional tools and integrations you can use with HubSpot’s email platform to create stunning emails.

For example, Litmus is a paid tool that allows HubSpot users to track their HubSpot emails. According to a recent post from the company, it allows users to view “reliable opens” as well as the total number of Apple-privacy-impacted opens, which can help email marketers determine how big the impact of Apple’s IOS changes are.

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What’s Next?

First and foremost, don’t panic! While iOS 15 will force email marketers to pivot strategy and process, it most certainly does not mean that email marketing is going away.

Apple’s launch of iOS 15 and its Email Privacy Protection Feature is indicative of a larger shift that we’re seeing in the digital marketing space. More and more Individuals are taking a larger interest in how their personal information is being collected, stored, and used. We will continue to see this trend grow as more businesses put protections in place for their customers.

As email marketers, it’s our responsibility to honor the inbox of every contact in our database with a personalized experience. With iOS 15, personalization has become harder.

As data protection continues to grow and evolve, personalization will become even more difficult. The best thing we can do moving forward is to stay informed and adjust our strategies accordingly. Because at the end of the day, email marketing is really about providing value to the Human’s on the other end of that Inbox.

Want to get more background on Apple’s privacy move? Check out this post. To learn more about how this move could impact your processes within HubSpot’s email tool specifically, follow this community thread.

When it comes to social media strategy, most brands know some of the top strategies: Post high-quality content, monitor your brand perception, engage with your audience.

But ever wonder if there are some strategies your social media team has been overlooking?

In this article, we’ll cover some strategies you may not have considered, with some data to support their effectiveness.

1. Leverage small, nano, and micro-influencers.

A 2021 State of User Generated Content report revealed that most marketers (93%) agree that consumers trust content created by people way more than brands.

People trust each other considerably more than they trust brands, and that’s why 75% of marketers are working with small to micro-influencers with followers ranging from 500 to 25,000, according to the study.

Why not mega influencers with millions of followers? Well, besides cost, some brands worry that as influencers become more celebrity-like and grow in popularity, they lose some of their influence – ironically enough.

As a result, brands are working more with small, blue-checkless content creators with great engagement and true influencers in their community. In 2018, an eMarketer study revealed that micro-influencers (between 10K-100K followers) were considered most effective.

User-generated content (UGC) will continue to be a great lead and revenue driver on social media. However, the shift toward smaller influencers may be the more effective (and affordable) way to increase brand awareness.

2. Stick to platform-specific content.

With so many different platforms to post on, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed.

Brands often try to batch-post their content by posting the same content on multiple platforms at once. For instance, the same video may go on Facebook, Instagram Reels, and TikTok.

While it may be a time-saver, it may hurt your brand in the long run. The competition between each social media platform is fiercer than ever before.

In Feb. 2021, Instagram announced it would deprioritize Reels with the TikTok trademark in it.

The trademark shows up when a TikTok user saves a video that was uploaded to the platform. Because TikTok is a direct competitor to Instagram Reels, the brand wants to promote the use of its own short-form software and keep users on its network.

This speaks to a larger effort from social media platforms to differentiate themselves from one another. In that same spirit, brands should follow a specific strategy for each platform, as consumer behavior differs from one site to the next.

3. Show the people behind your brand.

When I went on vacation a few weeks ago, my friends and I spent an hour discussing our favorite Black-owned brands, as Black women do.

One brand I highlighted was the luxury purse brand Anima Iris. I hadn’t even purchased from the brand but I was already loyal and I was eager to spread the word.

A few weeks later, I noticed that one of my friends kept sharing new content from Anima Iris with me. I mentioned that I loved how invested she became in the brand.

She responded, “It’s because I’m invested in her.” The “her” she was referring to is the company’s CEO, Wilglory Tanjong, who was incredibly visible on the brand’s social media.

In fact, the majority of the brand’s social media posts feature the CEO and her journey. Tanjong shares everything from new leathers she’s considering using to her struggle in raising capital.

What’s the point of the story? Well, brands often underestimate the power of transparency.

Back in 2018, a Sprout Social study revealed that 70% of consumers feel more connected to a brand when its CEO is active on social. They listed three reasons why:

• It feels like there are real people behind the brand.
• Consumers like learning about the leadership team.
• Consumers feel the CEO offers valuable insight into the brand itself.

This transparency has helped Tanjong build a community of loyal followers who are invested in her brand and engage frequently with her content.

Marketers often think of data privacy and social responsibility. But it’s also company culture, employees, processes, and everything in between.

In a 2020 study by Havas, consumers shared that they (58%) want brands to be more transparent and honest and their company, including their processes and products.

Transparency builds trust and allows you to speak directly with your audience. What’s better than that?

4. Focus on community, not promotion.

Social media builds brand awareness, true. However, too often, brands focus on output without considering community building.

Annabelle Nyst, senior content strategist on the HubSpot social team, encourages companies to create a community-focused social strategy.

“So many brands see social media as a vessel for promoting themselves and their owned content, without really giving too much thought to engaging or growing their community,” said Nyst.

She adds that brands should be proactive about participating in conversations, finding their facts, monitoring their brand perception, and celebrating UGC.

Takeaway: Get your audience invested in your brand and you’ll have an easier time getting them excited about your products or services.

5. Go live.

Live streaming allows brands to connect with their audience in real-time. In some instances, consumers prefer it over other content channels.

Back in 2017, Livestream found that 80% of consumers prefer watching a brand’s live video than read a blog post or see a social post.

In 2021, 28% of marketers planned to use it in their video marketing strategy, according to Wyzowl.

Other reasons to go live include:

• The ability to repurpose the live content into other posts.
• The ideas you get generate from connecting directly with your audience.
• The trust you can build by showing the faces behind your brand.

Social media is a beast that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Don’t be afraid to experiment, as that will help you better understand your audience and identify effective strategies.

Think about the last commercial you remember.

What about it made it memorable? That’s the answer every advertiser wants to know. I tend to remember ads that are funny and/or relatable, but is it the same for most consumers?

Let’s see what recent data suggests about memorable ads and discuss some tips for your next campaign.

Why Consumers Remember Ads

We surveyed 281 U.S. consumers and asked them to think back to a recent ad they saw and what made it memorable. Respondents could only select a single answer.

Here are the results.

Our research found that funny commercials were the number one reason why respondents recalled ads.

The second highest response was the value respondents ascribed to the information presented in the commercial.

The remaining options each made up less than 8% of the answers. Some remembered the ad because the product featured seemed valuable (7%), the ad told an interesting story (4%), or had a catchy element like a jingle or tagline (4%).

Additional reasons included:

• It featured interesting characters (3%)
• It was high action (3%)
• It made them sad (2%)
• It related to a topic I’m interested in (2%)
• it featured a celebrity or expert they knew (2%)

This survey also revealed that the least popular reason for ad recall was ad quality –meaning if it looked high budget (1%) or low budget (1%).

Insurance provider The General is a great example of how ads that are viewed as low budget can negatively affect brand perception.

CEO Tiku Raval revealed to AdWeek recently that the nature of its ads led consumers to believe they weren’t a reputable and credible company. Because of this, the brand recently overhauled its ad strategy with a fresh, new look.

The brand didn’t do this silently, they tackled the elephant in the room and addressed that misconception in its newest ads.

Now back to the research.

Eight percent of respondents said they remembered the ad for other reasons. One could be that the ad used fear, as that is a common tactic used in commercials. Particularly those that aim to change user habits or invite them to take action, like voting or smoking.

Now that we’ve gone through the results of the survey, let’s cover two of the most popular (and effective) devices used in advertising today and how they work to engage consumers.

The Use of Humor In Advertising

In my round-up of the top YouTube ads of the last two years, five out of nine ads that ranked were funny.

Our research revealed that ad recall was the strongest in ads that used humor. This supports research from a 2018 advertising survey by Clutch which showed that consumers prefer (and remember) ads that make them laugh.

Similarly, six out of nine ads that received an “A” grade in Kellogg’s 2021 School Super Bowl Advertising Review were humorous.

So, the question is why? Well, humor – when done right – brings people together through shared experiences. In fact, that’s what meme marketing is based on.

It allows people to forget their stresses.

The thing with humor is that you have to do it right. Otherwise, you risk facing a PR crisis.

Thinking back to 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 crisis, many brands halted ads and avoided humorous ads altogether, as many consumers found it inappropriate.

While the pandemic was extremely difficult to navigate, there were some moments of levity that could lend themselves well to advertisements.

Executive Creative Director Dave Hannenken from the advertising agency Hoffman York, wrote an article in which he highlighted some shared experiences we had during the pandemic. Working from home, baking banana bread, spending more time with kids and pets.

To get humor right, it’s all about finding a common ground and expanding upon it. Once you start zeroing in on something too unique and personal, that’s when you can land in the hot seat.

The Use of Education in Advertising

At the beginning of the buyer’s journey, consumers aren’t aware of the solutions to their problems. They may be aware of the challenges they face, but that may also be further down in the journey.

What we do know is that education can be an effective tool in building trust with your target audience and helping them move down the funnel.

Data from a 2018 Clutch advertising survey revealed that consumers want ads to teach them something. Fifty-one percent of respondents said they disliked an ad because it was uninformative.

Viewers want to leave an ad knowing about the product, the brand, and even the industry.

Education-driven ads can work particularly well for sustainability-conscious brands who share facts about the environment in their ads and explain what their company is doing to address it.

They appeal to consumers who value social responsibility and make purchasing decisions based on that – which is about 46% of consumers, according to a 2019 report.

Education can also be effective in ads that aim to promote an action or change a behavior.

While humor is a great way to grab their attention, it’s not the only way to captivate an audience. Creating compelling and memorable ads requires knowing your audience, understanding their challenges, and finding common ground that will resonate with them.

Keeping track of expenses as a business owner can be taxing. You have to document every detail to make sure you stay within your spending limits while promoting your products or services, delivering on promises, and developing new offerings.

A business budget worksheet can help you stay organized.

Having a template to work from will cut down on the time it takes to write down the details of a budget, help you prioritize projects and allocate resources to get them done, and reveal trends of the money you spend versus the results achieved.

Depending on the complexity of your company, you may need to oversee a number of individual budgets while managing the overall spend. The business budget worksheets below range from specific templates — from product marketing to website redesign — to comprehensive ones that cover all aspects of your marketing plan.

Let’s dive in so you can take control of your budget like never before.

How to Write a Business Budget

1. Use Budget Templates

Creating a business budget from scratch can be overwhelming—you need to capture the details of each month’s projected budget, actual spend, and the cumulative total of each.

If you’ve never written a business budget or are looking for a specific marketing worksheet, you can start with HubSpot’s Marketing Budget Templates. This download includes eight well-designed and detailed templates to easily manage your finances, with options for Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. A quick overview explains how to use each template so you can easily start filling in your own information.

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2. Set Your Strategy and Goals

To make the most of your budget, you have to know what goals you want to achieve and the strategy to get there. If you’re working to bring in more sales (a goal) and plan to improve your website to attract leads (the strategy), you’ll have to put funds towards the redesign project.

Check out these strategic planning models that can help map out your long-term goals if your business is just getting off the ground. That way, your budget will reflect the financial resources needed to accomplish your objectives.

3. Gather the Numbers

Every company has different needs, so no one budget will be exactly the same. A branding and creative budget, for example, will have vastly different line items than a website redesign budget.

No matter what budget you’re putting together, you’ll need all of the relevant expenses for a comprehensive overview. Here are the basic numbers you may want to include:

• Revenue projections: Consider your historical financial performance and projected growth income.
• Fixed-cost projections: The costs that don’t change (i.e. employee compensation, office rent, business software, insurance, and utilities).
• Variable-cost projections: The costs that may change month-to-month (i.e. overtime compensation, supply costs, or software that varies by usage).
• Annual project expenses: The cumulative costs of implementing all of your company goals for the year.
• Individual project expenses: The costs associated with each project, which should be tracked in individual budget worksheets.
• Target profit margin: A ratio that reveals how much money a company makes. Knowing your bottom line — and including it in your budget — is a helpful reminder of what you hope to achieve within the year and a good benchmark when analyzing your monthly financial trends.

Depending on the budget, you can also include cash, inventory, accounts receivable, net fixed assets, or long-term debt.

How to Manage a Business Budget

No budget is an island. All companies are impacted by poorly-managed budgets, especially a small business just starting out.

When your budget is just one piece of the puzzle, you’ll likely need to get it approved by a manager or executive team before spending any money. If you’re running a business on your own or with a small team, it’s smart to find a trusted colleague or financial expert to look over your numbers. They may be able to point out areas to cut costs, reallocate funds, or create larger profit margins.

Want to make sure you’re on track? Figure out how much you should put aside for a marketing budget that meets your goals.

Once your budget is in place, checking in on it once a year isn’t enough — you need to review it monthly (at minimum) to make sure your expenses aren’t out of control. Once you set your annual budget, revisit it at the beginning and end of every month. If you like to be in the know, you can even set a time to review it mid-month to double-check that everything is on track.

When a new project pops up, simply add it to your existing business budget worksheet and make adjustments to the overall expenses. The same thing applies if you wind up dropping a project. Company priorities change constantly, and your budget needs to adapt along with the shifts.

Business Budget Worksheets for Small Businesses

You poured through past financial records, made future projections, mapped out your upcoming projects, and have all of the information you need to build a well-rounded budget. Now it’s time to choose the best business budget worksheet for your goals. Luckily, all of these options make it simple to stay on top of your finances.

HubSpot Marketing Budget Templates

If you want a worksheet for each marketing niche, HubSpot has you covered. One download gives you access to eight budget templates: a master marketing sheet, product marketing, content, paid advertising, public relations, branding and creative, website redesign, and events.

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Small Business Budget Templates

Simplicity is the theme of these business budget worksheets by Smartsheet. Each Excel template is free to download, with options for multiple products, business expenses, startups, and more.

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Business Expense Template

Need a polished business expense budget? Microsoft Office has you covered with this well-designed Excel template that outlines costs for employees, marketing, office space, travel, and training. Just fill in the blanks and send it for approval.

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Year-Over-Year Budget Template

For a simple look at how your incomes and expenses change from year to year, this Excel template from Quickbooks is all you need.

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Freelance Budget Templates

Working for yourself often means combining personal and business expenses. That’s why these Excel templates from Business Load include income projections alongside personal costs. You can even budget what you’ll contribute to taxes, your 401k, and emergency fund all in the same sheet—because you likely have more than enough to manage.

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Sample Business Budget Worksheet

Personally, I’d rather endure the monotony of writing lines than spend all day organizing numbers in a blank spreadsheet. But having an example to work from makes it easier to make sure everything is on track. If you share that mindset, here’s a filled-in sample of a business budget worksheet to get you started.

The sample shows the budget needed for a website redesign project, with each expense categorized to keep it organized and easy to read. You can see where the budget went over (UX testing) and where savings happened (CMS software).

Setting up your own business budget using these templates is so quick and easy, you can have your numbers in order in no time. The sooner you begin, the better off your budget (and business) will be in the months and years to come.

As a marketer or business analyst, you know that data is an important part of your success. And the way you store and organize your data will either make your job easier or harder.

There are many ways that you can store data, one of them being data warehousing. This is an excellent option for businesses that need to look at a large amount of data from multiple sources. Today, let’s learn what a data warehouse is and how it can help you analyze your data.

With a data warehouse, you can perform queries and look at historical data over time to improve decision-making. The main people in a company who will use data warehouses are data scientists and business analysts.

A data warehouse will get data from multiple sources, including relational databases or transactional systems. To access the data, analysts will use business intelligence tools to analyze, data mine, make visualizations, and conduct reporting. As data continues to evolve, it’s imperative for businesses to use data to stay competitive.

What is the ultimate outcome of a data warehouse?

The ultimate outcome of a data warehouse is to extract insights, monitor performance, and improve decision-making. By using reports, dashboards, and visualizations, analysts have all the tools they need to make the right decisions.

Benefits of Using a Data Warehouse

1. Historical data.

One of the main benefits of data warehouses is the ability to look at a large amount of historical data over time. With a data warehouse, you can consolidate a large amount of data from many sources to better inform your business decisions. Looking at historical data will allow you to analyze trends over time and strategize effectively.

2. Data from multiple sources.

Additionally, with a data warehouse, you’ll be getting data from multiple sources so you’ll have a more complete picture when it comes time to analyze the information. With something like a data mart, you only get data from a single subject, as opposed to data warehouses that are meant to process and organize data from multiple sources.

3. Stability.

Data warehouses are also more stable sources of data that you can use to look at data at a high level or a granular level. This gives you the flexibility to look at data closely and perform queries quickly. A data warehouse will have high-quality data because it’s coming from multiple sources, it’s consistent and more accurate.

What Data Warehouses are Not

When you first hear the term “data warehouse,” you might think of a few other data terms like “data lake,” “database,” or “data mart.” However, those things are different because they have a more limited scope. While they might perform a similar function, the structure is different. Let’s dive in below.

Data Lake vs. Data Warehouse

A data lake stores unfiltered data from multiple sources to be used for a specific purpose. This means that you’re looking at raw data from something like social media or an app. The datasets are built at the time of analysis. This is low-cost storage for unformatted, unstructured data.

On the other hand, data warehouses are used to analyze and process data. In a data warehouse, the data has already been gathered and contextualized and is ready for analysis. Ultimately, it’s a more advanced data storage tool that can use large amounts of historical data.

Data Mart vs. Data Warehouse

A data mart is a subset of a data warehouse. Usually, they’re designed to easily deliver specific data to a specific user for a specific application. Data marts are single subject in nature, while data warehouses cover multiple subjects.

Database vs. Data Warehouse

Databases are often confused with data warehouses because they serve a similar purpose. However, the difference is that databases are not meant to perform analytics on a large collection of data. Databases are used to record and retrieve data while data warehouses are meant to analyze large amounts of data sets. Think about it like this: data warehouses store data from multiple databases.

Data Warehouse Architecture

A data warehouse architecture is a method you use to organize, communicate, and present your data.

You can use a basic architecture, a staging area, or a staging area and data marts.

This means that you can have a data warehouse get its data and then have the users look at reporting and analysis. Or you can have the data broken down into data marts before users look at the analysis and reporting.

The staging area you see in some of the images below is used to clean and process data before putting it in a warehouse. This simplifies data preparation. To get an idea of what each of these looks like, take a look at the images below.

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Data Warehouse Software

1. Snowflake Data Warehouse

Snowflake data warehouse is a data platform built on the cloud infrastructure. This is a great option for businesses that don’t have the resources to support in-house servers.

With Snowflake, users can pay for storage and share data easily. You can mobilize data seamlessly across public clouds as data consumers, data providers, and data service providers. This software will help you democratize data analytics across your business so all users with varying expertise can make data-informed decisions.

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2. MarkLogic

With this data warehouse solution, you can perform complex search operations with different types of data including documents, relationships, and metadata. MarkLogic is a fully managed, fully automated cloud service to integrate data from silos.

3. Oracle

Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse is a fully managed database tuned and optimized for data warehouse workloads with the performance of Oracle Database. It delivers a new, comprehensive cloud experience for data warehousing that is easy, fast, and elastic.

While data solutions might seem overwhelming, they’re important for your day-to-day business decisions. With a data warehouse, you can simplify your data storage, management, and analytics.