Category Archives: B2B

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

Download for Free

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

Download for Free

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.

 Image Source

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.

Have you ever wondered what people actually do when they enter your WordPress website?

Have you thought about which website pages they tend to stay on longest, what campaigns bring them there, and which of your website pages convert the best?

Google Analytics can help you understand all of this information and more. By simply installing a Google Analytics plugin on your WordPress website, you can start collecting this data immediately. With help from a plugin, adding Google Analytics to WordPress is a painless process.

If you’d rather not install a plugin for this purpose, there are other ways to integrate Google Analytics with your website too — as long as you’re comfortable with code.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to install Google Analytics in WordPress with two different methods. In a handful of steps, you can uncover insights about your website visitors — including what is and isn’t working for them — to improve the user experience, increase conversions, and learn about your audience.

Google Analytics for WordPress: What Can You Track?

Whether you’re looking for details about who is visiting your site, what they’re doing while on your site, or how long they’re staying on specific pages, Google Analytics provides you with the report you need. The tool allows you to track many interactions between your website and visitors.

Let’s review some more of the specific types of reporting Google Analytics provides:

Real-time Activity

Realtime reports show you current activity on your website, including where visitors enter your website and the actions they take on your site. You can also see how users are getting to your site, what pages they’re visiting, and whether they’re converting. This report is useful for monitoring the immediate results of a campaign, social media post, or real-world event.

Acquisition

Acquisition reports will help you understand where your visitors are coming from. This information is helpful when setting up your marketing campaigns because it can show you exactly what’s working best for your acquired visitors. It also tells you which users are new and which are returning.

Engagement

Engagement reports help you understand how users are interacting with your website. It includes page views, scrolling activity, time-on-page, interactions with media, and other important events. Google Analytics groups user activity by sessions — a session can be understood as a single visit to your website.

This report also tracks conversion rates. You can compare them to your goal and understand which CTAs are working. You’ll learn more about which CTAs and landing pages on your site are successful and what keeps your visitors most engaged.

Monetization

Monetization reports track your revenue from purchases, subscriptions, and advertisements on your site. It also shows you how users move through the checkout process and how they engage with your product pages.

Retention

Retention reports monitor how well your website retains visitors — in other words, how often users return to your website after their first visit, and for how long. You can also view retention by cohort. A cohort is a group of users that share a characteristic, like the date of their first session.

Demographics

The demographics report will help you understand who your visitors are. It reports users by age, language, location, gender, and topics of interest.

Tech

Tech reports show you the technology that visitors use to access your website, including device category (desktop, mobile, or tablet) and accessing application (web browser or mobile application). This information can help guide your optimization efforts based on which technologies your users prefer.

Analytics Specific to Your Plugin

In addition to the plethora of information that you receive from Google Analytics, your chosen plugin will also provide you with unique insights. For example, let’s review what ExactMetrics provides. Some of these insights and features come standard with other analytics plugins in the WordPress library as well.

In-Depth Performance Reports. These reports provide you with in-depth performance details, such as bounce rates, referrals, page views, organic searches, and more, for each post and page on your website so you can segment your analytical data in a way that makes sense for your website and business.

Real-Time Stats. You’ll be able to review real-time statistics any time you open the plugin. Some of these stats include the current number of visitors on your website, your acquisition channels, and the source of your current traffic.

Custom Dimension Tracking. You can create custom dimensions to get specific data that matters to you and your business. For example, you can create custom dimension tracking about certain events and types of user engagement that are important to you.

Set Permissions Based On User Roles. If you have a large team, or team of people with different qualifications and needs when it comes to your analytics, you can set permissions based on user roles. This way you can ensure only the right people can make changes.

How to Set Up Google Analytics for WordPress

To add Google Analytics to your WordPress site, you can either go with a plugin or opt for a manual approach. We’ll review both methods, starting with the plugin.

But, whichever method you choose, make sure you have an active Google Analytics account. To sign up for Google Analytics, first create a Google account. If you already have a Google account, you’re off to a great start because that’s the only way you can use Google Analytics.

Sign in to your Google account, then head to the Google Analytics sign-up page and click Start measuring.

On the Account Setup page, fill in the necessary information. Your Account Name will be the Google Analytics profile name for your website. You can choose whatever name you like, but we recommend using your business name.

Next, check your preferred boxes under Account Data Sharing Settings to control how Google may share your data, then click Next.

Under Property Setup, provide a name for your first Google Analytics property. You can make this your website’s domain name for now. Click Next.

Finally, under About your business, you can provide additional information about your company. This section is optional. To complete setup, click Create.

You’ll now be taken to your analytics dashboard. On this screen, under Choose a platform, click Web (since you’re tracking a website).

You’ll be asked to set up a data stream, which is a source of data from a website or an app. Fill in the required fields and click Create stream. This provides you with a measurement ID, a string of characters you’ll use to send your website tracking data to Google Analytics. If you go with a plugin, you may need to add this information to the plugin, so it’s a good idea to keep this tab open.

Now that your Google Analytics account is ready, let’s learn how to link it to your WordPress site with a plugin.

Set Up Google Analytics With a WordPress Plugin

Depending on the Google Analytics plugin you choose, setup may differ slightly. For the sake of this example, we’re going to review how to set up the ExactMetrics plugin. Whichever plugin option you end up picking for your site, the process will look fairly similar.

First, you’ll need to install and activate ExactMetrics on your site. (Not sure how? See our guide to installing WordPress plugins.) Once that’s done, select the new ExactMetrics option from your WordPress dashboard, then click Launch Setup Wizard.

Click through the setup screens until you’re prompted to sign in to Google and grant the plugin your desired permissions. Then, on the Connect Google Analytics to Your Website screen, choose the view you created previously and click Complete Connection.

After clicking through some additional screens, you’ll be ready to use Google Analytics with WordPress. View your analytics under ExactMetrics > Reports.

Some plugins may require you to insert the tracking code yourself if they don’t come with the same level of automation. You can find this tracking information by going to your Google Analytics admin tab (the cog icon in the bottom left corner of the dashboard), then choosing Data Streams under the desired account and property.

Then, click your data stream. You’ll see your Measurement ID in the top right corner. Further down under Tagging Instruction, you’ll also see your Global Site Tag, a block of code to add analytics to your website in the <head> section of your HTML.

The easiest way to add this script to your HTML is with the Insert Headers and Footers plugin — this lets you add tracking code without directly modifying your files, which could break your site.

Set Up Google Analytics Without a WordPress Plugin

Those who would rather not use a plugin and are comfortable editing WordPress theme files directly can choose this next method instead. Before continuing, back up your WordPress site in case something goes wrong in the process.

Since this method also requires you to change theme files, we also recommend making your edits to a child theme so that you can update the parent theme without losing your modifications.

To get your tracking code, go to your Google Analytics admin tab (the cog icon in the bottom left corner of the dashboard) and choose Data Streams under the desired account and property. Select the data stream you want, then scroll down to Tagging Instruction. Open the Global Site Tag accordion and copy the code.

Next, you’ll paste this code into your active theme’s header.php file. Edit this file however you prefer — you can download the file and re-upload it to your server, or edit the file through WordPress under Appearance > Theme Editor.

In header.php, paste your tracking code just above the closing </head> tag (pictured below) and save your changes.

This code will send tracking information from your website to Google Analytics.

Use Google Analytics to understand your WordPress site.

Google Analytics provides you with insights and data that can help you drastically improve the state of your website. You can learn more about what your visitors enjoy and discover more about who they are, so you can continue to tailor your content to their needs.

With WordPress, installing Google Analytics on your website is quick and easy. In just minutes, you can start collecting the information that you need to enhance user experience and increase conversions on your WordPress website.

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

Whether you’re working with an online business or a brick-and-mortar bolstered by an online presence, one question is destined to come up: how many visitors should your site get?

Some tracking software makes it easy to gather metrics, but what does it all mean? A screen of numbers doesn’t magically transform into a successful marketing strategy and more visitors. Understanding and interpreting your site’s analytics (users, sessions, bounce rate, etc.) is the key to building, adjusting, and implementing the proper plan for growth.

To understand how many visitors your site should get, you will need to:

• determine how many visitors are typical to websites in your industry
• establish a goal based on the variables (industry, size, user experience) of the company
• create a reasonable plan with actionable steps to execute a successful marketing strategy

How many visitors does a website typically get?

It depends. With the number of websites available on the web, it would be impossible to narrow this question down to one answer. Fortunately, there are tools and resources to help you make an educated guess.

Before diving into monthly website visitors, it could help to understand the breakdown of website traffic. As of 2019, the statistical data platform Statista outlined the distribution of worldwide website traffic by its source. The breakdown is as follows:

• Direct (55%)
• Search (29%)
• Referral (13%)
• Social (2.5%)
• Paid Search (0.5%)

As you analyze other companies and industries, you can assume that typically, over half of their visits come from direct searches. Most visitors are landing on a particular webpage because they typed the URL into the address bar. Understanding that more than half (55%) of visitors come from direct traffic and more than a quarter (29%) come from search engine result pages (SERPs), use this knowledge when combing through the metrics of other companies.

How do you find these statistics? Platforms such as SimilarWeb, SEMRush, Ahrefs, and Alexa offer website traffic information for many domains. While these websites will push out an impressive list of metrics, take this information with a grain of salt. Unless the information is coming from the company, and even then, you can’t assume that the data is foolproof.

The following table compares traffic breakdowns from SimilarWeb (SW) and SEMRush (SEM) for five companies.

Company	Total Visits		Pages Per Visit		Bounce Rate
	SW	SEM	SW	SEM	SW	SEM
Black Enterprise	2.48M	1.6M	1.42	1.57	79.08%	67.32%
Hello Fresh	9.47M	8.3M	5.81	3.41	43.43%	47.84%
Alibaba	101.19M	66.2M	5.23	3.99	43.38%	49.84
Amazon	2.65B	3.3B	8.66	7.05	35.54%	37.49%
Youtube	35.11B	20.8B	11.4	3.75	20.96%	48.22%

You’ll find that the same website differs in every single metric provided by Similar Web and SEMRush. While you can’t assume which platform is more accurate than the other, you can use a combination of information from different sources to make an educated guess and average.

Amazon (amazon.com) and Youtube (youtube.com) are two of the most visited websites globally. While SimilarWeb doesn’t offer monthly visitor data with their free version, SEMRush does. For August 2021, the platform lists Amazon and Youtube domains with 669.2M and 1.6B unique monthly visitors, respectively. To clarify, 1.6 billion different people made their way onto the Youtube website in August 2021 — according to SEMRush.

While the numbers will vary, you can still create a snapshot of how many visitors a website typically gets. Unfortunately, it is harder to find this information for small and medium-sized businesses versus large corporations.

How do you scale this information to your business? There are a series of factors to consider when determining how many visitors your site should get and setting a “good” number as your goal.

How many unique visitors per month is good?

The answer to this question depends on a few factors. First, are you evaluating a B2B, B2C, or hybrid company? B2B companies have a target audience of other businesses and organizations. B2C companies target direct consumers. One can infer that the potential for more unique monthly visitors for B2C companies is greater than that of B2B companies simply because their target audience is exponentially larger. B2B companies use niche marketing to sell particular products or services to a specific group of businesses while B2C companies focus their strategy on the needs, interests, and challenges of people in their everyday lives.

Taking note of the business model, determining how many monthly unique visitors is “good” for your company depends on your answers to the following questions:

• What is the standard in your industry?
• How much content do you produce?
• How well is your content strategy working?
• What is the search volume for your targeted topics?
• How competitive are your target keywords?

What is the standard in your industry?

To make an accurate guess of where your company should be, determine the industry standard. To do this, evaluate your competition. Using tools like the previously mentioned SimilarWeb and SEMRush, you can create a general overview of your competitors, and use these statistics to establish an average for your industry.

How much content do you produce?

The more content you have available on your site, the more opportunities you create for visitors to find it. How much new content are you producing? One? Three? Five or more? The size of your team will affect the amount of content you’re able to create. If you find that you’re unable to produce new content, consider expanding the size of your team to meet your needs.

How well is your content strategy working?

To fix something, you need to know if it’s broken. Evaluate whether your content strategy is working. Are you ranking for your keywords? Have you seen an increase in views over the last few months? Where is the bulk of your traffic coming from? Once you can determine how your site is currently performing, you can take active steps to create an effective content strategy.

What is the search volume for your targeted topics?

Search volume for your targeted topics is directly related to the demand for that information, product, or service. High search volume can mean more visitors; however, this is directly affected by the competitiveness of your keywords.

How competitive are your target keywords?

A combination of these factors affects your website’s unique visitors per month, but it boils down to competition. The more competitive your target keywords, the harder it is to rank on the first page of a SERP. The more competitive the industry, the greater the chances of having potential website visitors split among the competition.

Other factors that can affect your number of unique visitors per month are security, accessibility, mobile-friendly web pages, and user experience.

Security

Establishing a safe and secure website with an SSL certificate can boost your reputation and relationship with future consumers. Not only does it mean less time worrying about potential security incidents, but it allows your visitors to insert their information into your systems with confidence.

Accessibility

Fifteen percent of the world’s population are persons with disabilities. Many still use the web, and businesses must ensure that their content is accessible. Accessibility is not a feature, and making your website convenient to all visitors is not a bonus but a necessity.

Mobile-Friendliness

If your site isn’t mobile-friendly for cell phone users, you’re cutting off a large portion of potential visitors. In 2019, the World Advertising Research Center (WARC) estimated that around 2 billion people accessed the internet via only their smartphones. The report also stated that this number will be equivalent to 3.7 billion people (or 72.6%) by 2025.

User Experience

Click-through rate and bounce rate are metrics that help determine the user experience on your website. Evaluate them together. While a high click-through rate is positive, a high bounce rate is negative. Click-through rate is the percentage of people who visit your page after it comes up in a search. Bounce rate is the percentage of people who arrive and leave your web page quickly after landing on it. A high bounce rate sends search engines a signal that your content isn’t relevant to the users and negatively affects your rank.

Once you can evaluate your industry, website, and content strategy, the next step is to set goals and execute them.

Setting Reasonable Goals For Website Traffic

Focus on the word “reasonable.” A goal to reach 10,000 monthly visitors next month might not be a stretch if you garnered 9,000 visitors this month; however, if your website receives an average of 2,500 monthly visitors, this goal might be less probable. Setting a realistic and attainable goal is the key to creating the proper marketing strategy for your business.

Define Your Goal

First, define your goal. Analyze your current metrics and that of your competitors. Let’s use HelloFresh and other meal kit delivery services as an example. The company’s direct competitors include Home Chef, Blue Apron, and Sunbasket. The ranking for their monthly unique visitors, according to SEMRush, is as follows for August 2021:

• HelloFresh (4.9 Million)
• Home Chef (2 Million)
• Blue Apron (1.2 Million)
• Sunbasket (696.6K)

As previously mentioned, do not analyze these numbers as fact. They are a guide. If a new meal kit delivery service looked at the monthly unique visitors for these companies, they’d get an average of 2.1 million monthly views. Now, this can be a goal for the future but not the immediate future.

A monthly goal for a small business receiving 5000 unique monthly visitors could be 10% or 500 new visitors. Set goals with a content plan in mind. With this goal in place, you can use it to determine the success of your content strategy.

Build a Content Plan Around MSV

Monthly search volume (MSV) is the number of times a specific keyword is entered into a search engine each month. MSV allows you to anticipate the amount of traffic available for a particular keyword term. Armed with this knowledge, you’ll be able to gauge which keywords are worth targeting for your content strategy. You’ll also be able to assess the needs of potential clients and customers and cater your content to them.

Some free online keyword tools that help calculate MSV include Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs Keyword Generator, and Answer the Public.

Determine a Publishing Cadence

In conjunction with creating your content strategy, lay out a schedule. How often you update your website is key to attracting more visitors because you increase the number of opportunities to land on your page. At the bare minimum, you want to post new content to your website every week. The amount of content is, of course, dependent on the size of your team and audience. The more resources you have, the more content you can create. The larger your audience, the more content you should create.

While determining a publishing cadence is necessary, it is equally important to stick to it and remain consistent.

Assess Your Performance

The first step to assessing your goals is having a data reporting software set up. Once you do, it’s time to see if your unique monthly visitors increased. Whether or not you met your goal, ask yourself the following questions to review your progress:

• Did your unique monthly visitors increase or decrease? By what percent?
• Are you ranking for targeted keywords?
• Was there a trend (increase or decrease) in visitors across your industry?

An increase or decrease in your unique monthly visitors isn’t enough to gauge the complete success of your goal or content strategy. Are you ranking for your targeted keywords? If yes, your content strategy is working, and your location in SERPs can lead to further increases in the future. If not, reassess and adopt new SEO methods for growth.

When assessing your performance, it might also be necessary to measure factors out of your control, for example, industry trends. Was there a mutual dip in unique monthly views among you and your competitors? It is possible that your keyword MSV wasn’t as high as in previous months. A decrease in MSV for your keywords is out of your control. However, it is your responsibility to pivot and discover what your target audience is searching for.

How many visitors should your site get?

In content strategy and marketing, consistency is key. How many visitors should your site get? Ultimately, it comes down to how consistent you are in the tips featured above. Do you keep up with industry best practices to guide your knowledge on MSV? Do you periodically evaluate your content to boost your SEO? Are you updating your information to guide your goals?

There is no magic number when it comes to monthly website visitors. Evaluate your website and use your current metrics to determine where you want to be in one, six, or 12 months from now. Changes rarely happen overnight. Set reasonable goals with realistic timelines, and you’ll eventually see growth.

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

It’s no secret that data can be very powerful — when you can actually understand what it’s telling you, that is.

It’s not easy to get clear takeaways by looking at a slew of numbers and stats. You need to have the data presented in a logical, easy-to-understand way so you can apply your learnings in an effective way. That’s where data visualization comes in.

In this article, we’ll offer you applicable ways to ensure your data visualization is effective, and provide examples for inspiration along the way.

What is data visualization?

Data visualization allows you to organize data in a way that’s both compelling and easy to digest.

It’s about representing data in a visual context, such as a chart or a map, to help anyone viewing it better understand the significance of that data.

How does data visualization work?

Whereas data shared via text can be confusing (not to mention bland), data represented in a visual format can help people extract meaning from that information more quickly and easily.

Data visualization allows you to expose patterns, trends, and correlations that may otherwise go undetected, too.

Static vs. Interactive Data Visualization

Data visualization can be static or interactive. For centuries, people have been using static data visualization like charts and maps.

Interactive data visualization is a little bit newer: It lets people drill down into the dirty details of these charts and graphs using their computers and mobile devices, and then interactively change which data they see and how it’s processed.

Time Series Visualization

In addition to static and interactive data visualization, you may also hear the term time series visualization. Time series visualization is what it sounds like — visuals that track data, or performance, over a period of time.

This is important because a major reason why people want to focus on data visualization is to show changes in variables over time.

Time Series Data Visualization Examples

There are many ways to use time-series data visualization — you’ll learn more about these below, but here’s a quick list to give you a better understanding of which visuals are considered time series visuals.

• Line chart
• Bar chart
• Area chart
• Bullet graph

Data Visualization Best Practices

While determining how you’ll visualize your data, one of the first things you’ll want to do is keep the following best practices in mind.

1. Choose the best visual for your data and its purpose.
2. Ensure your data is easily understandable and viewable.
3. Offer necessary context for your audience in and around your visual.
4. Keep your visual as simple and straightforward as possible.
5. Educate your audience with your visuals.

Featured Guide: An Introduction to Data Visualization

Learn how to apply data visualization best practices in your marketing with this free guide.

1. Line Chart

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Use a line chart to display your data over the course of time to view trends and intervals. You can do this with a single, or multiple, data point(s).

2. Bar Chart

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Use a bar chart to compare groups or categories while also displaying clear values.

Wondering how you could use this? Say you’ve been using Casted for your content marketing and need to report on which medium is performing best. You can pull data reports from the dashboard to visualize the data for key stakeholders.

3. Scatter Chart

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Use a scatter chart to show the values of two different variables as points on a chart.

4. Area Chart

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Use an area chart in a similar way to how you’d use a line chart.

The difference is that the area below the line is filled with color and/ or texture with an area chart. Both area and line charts display the evolution of a value.

5. Map

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Use a map to display data that are geographically located and to show the distribution and proportion of data in specific areas.

6. Indicator

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Use an indicator if you want to display your data with visuals like a gauge or ticker which will clearly show which direction things are moving over time.

7. Pivot Table

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Use a pivot table to summarize a large amount of information while specifically highlighting the most critical data for audience members.

8. Bullet Graph

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Use a bullet graph or chart in a similar way to how you’d use a bar chart. The main difference is that a bullet graph allows you to include more detailed information and data in a way that doesn’t look or feel cluttered.

9. Box Plot

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Use a box plot to view the distribution of your data — you’ll have one box plot for each attribute you’re displaying.

10. Matrix

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Use a matrix to display the relationships between hundreds or thousands of data points, variables, and more to understand their interactions all in one location.

Ready to feel inspired? Let’s take a look at some great examples of interactive and static data visualization.

Examples of Data Visualization

Below are 16 examples of data visualization, split into two major sections: interactive and static data visualization.

Examples of Interactive Data Visualization

1. Why Buses Bunch

Here’s an example of a complex data set boiled down in a way that looks and feels like a game. In this visualization, Setosa is showing how “bus bunching” happens, i.e. when a bus gets delayed and later causes multiple buses to arrive at a single stop at the same time.

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Telling this story in numbers alone would be pretty difficult — instead, they turn it into an interactive game that makes the data easier to understand. While the buses rotate along a route, you can click and hold a button to delay a bus. Then, all you have to do is watch to see how even a short delay causes the buses to bunch together.

2. Languages in the World

This interactive by DensityDesign introduces the non-linguist to the many world languages. All 2,678 of them.

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This piece allows you to explore common language families, see which languages are most frequently spoken, and view where languages are spoken around the world.

This is visual storytelling: taking an in-depth subject and breaking it down in an easy-to-understand way.

3. Percent of U.S. Population by Age Group

This is an example of how to present a single data set in a compelling way. Pew Research created an animated GIF composite to show shifts in population demographics over time. It’s an effective way to tell a larger story in a neat package.

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Plus, this type of micro-content is easy to share on social or embed in blogs, extending the content’s reach.

If you want to make a GIF of your own using Photoshop, here’s a step-by-step tutorial.

4. The Complete History of the NFL

In this interactive visualization below, an “Elo rating” — a simple measure of strength based on game-by-game results — has been calculated for every game in the history of the National Football League (NFL).

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That’s over 30,000 ratings in total. Viewers can compare each team’s Elo to see how each team performed across decades of play.

5. U.S. Thanksgiving on Google Flights

This visual is powered by Google Trends. It tracked flights as they flew to, from, and across the United States on the day before Thanksgiving.

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The visualization starts at the very beginning of the day and plays like a movie as time goes on, showing flights moving around the country.

Without showing any numbers besides the time, viewers can see which times were most popular for international flights, domestic flights, and flights to/ from different hubs around the country.

6. What’s Really Warming the World?

Ever heard a version of the advice, “Don’t simply show the data tell a story with it”? That’s exactly what this visualization from Bloomberg Business does — and it’s the interactive part that makes the story move along from beginning to end. The visual disproves theories that claim that global warming can be explained by natural causes.

The first thing you’ll see is the observed temperature as it’s risen from 1880 to present day.

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As you scroll down, the visualization takes you through exactly how much different factors contribute to global warming in comparison to what’s been observed, adding a richer layer of storytelling. The conclusion the authors want viewers to draw is made very clear.

7. Most Valuable Sports Franchises

Here’s an example of telling a deeper story by adding data.

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The interactive visual lets users see the number of years each team has competed, as well as the number of championships won. This offers a more comprehensive view of each team’s history and success as a franchise.

8. U.S. Wind Map

Here’s a visual similar that shows the wind speeds and directions in the U.S. in real-time back in 2015.

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It’s a great example of intuitive design: Speed is represented by lines moving slowly or quickly, and direction is represented by which way the lines are moving. It’s immediately clear what the general trends are without any need for numbers unless you click into the map itself. Plus, capping the number of variables at two makes it even easier to follow.

Examples of Static Data Visualization

9) Where News Audiences Fit on the Political Spectrum

This visual shows data organized on a distribution plot — this is an effective visual choice because it allows viewers to see where each media outlet lies on a spectrum.

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On a spectrum, the distance between each media outlet is significant. If these outlets were just listed one after the other in a table, viewers wouldn’t be able to see where each one stood in context.

10. The Daily Routines of Famous Creative People

Using information from the book Daily Rituals by Mason Currey, the site showcases the daily schedules of famous creatives broken down by time and activity.

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Not only is this an example of engaging data (you can explore the schedules by individual activity), it’s also an effective editorial piece for a brand.

11. The Year in News

Echelon Insights created this visual to depict the most talked-about news stories of 2014 on Twitter.

What do 184.5 million tweets look like? Cool spin art!

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12. The Depth of the Problem

When you want to illustrate scale, static data visualization can be a great way to make your point. The infographic below from The Washington Post is incredibly long … and that’s on purpose.

In this case, they’re showing how crazy far a deep-sea signal from an airplane can be detected by comparing that depth to tall buildings, the maximum depth of known mammals, the depth of the Titanic wreck, and so on.

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It’s a great use of simple visuals and color gradients. Finally, adding data to a news story (in this case, the missing Malaysian airliner) provides necessary context.

13. Funding the Final Frontier

While the infographic above is pretty simple, there are ways to create well-designed infographics that deliver a large amount of data. The secret? A simple and clean format that makes it easy for readers to understand the data.

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This infographic, created by GOOD Magazine and Column Five, breaks down NASA’s five-year budget to show how and where the money will be spent. Plus, it has an on-theme design — an all-around win.

14. Caritas Kontaktladen Annual Report

Not all data visualizations need to be animated. When real-world data is visualized with real-life examples, the results can be stunning. The designer of this visual took a unique approach to the data contained in the annual report.

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The organization provides support to drug addicts in Austria, so Luttenberger focused on communicating the mission through real-life visuals. For example, this shopping cart visualization represents how much of life’s necessities a welfare recipient can afford each day.

15. Austria Solar Annual Report

While there are many ways to visualize data, using the information subject to actually create the data visualization can be pretty profound.

This annual report from Austria Solar uses actual solar power to bring the company’s data to life through solar-activated inks on the page.

The good examples of data visualization above are great to reference while you develop your approach. However, it’s also important we consider the less effective ways to go about data visualization so you know what to avoid — so, let’s cover some bad examples next.

Bad Data Visualization Examples

There are many ways in which data visualization can go wrong.

For instance, look at this data visualization example of MLS salaries in 2013. The sheer amount of information on this chart makes it difficult to read.

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Additionally, the scale of the variables requires audience members to zoom in significantly to read the data. Some of the boxes that are being used to depict data appear to be vertical while most are horizontal — this also makes the information confusing to read.

When you include a number of completely different variables within a single visual, it also becomes complicated for audience members to understand — the following chart is an example of this.

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Something else you’ll want to do is make sure you’re not making your visual more complicated than it needs to be. For example, this chart has a number of variables that are depicted by 3D bars. This graph doesn’t need to be 3D — in fact, it simply makes the information more difficult to understand and view.

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Lastly, let’s review some data visualization tools to help make this process simpler.

Data Visualization Tools

There are a number of data visualization resources available today but the following list is here to help get you started. Don’t be afraid to test out a few options to determine which option suits your needs (and data) best.

1. HubSpot

HubSpot offers several options for data visualization, specifically within Reports. You can create graphs and charts in many ways depending on your preference.

There’s also a Dashboard and Reporting add-on that can ease the process of data visualization. Lastly, HubSpot allows you to manage your data and dashboards, as well as customize them, in a way that suits your specific needs.

2. Tableau Desktop

Tableau Desktop’s data visualization software offers live analytics with interactive dashboards so you’re able to easily spot trends, patterns, and insights.

There are easy-to-make maps, indicators, and many more visuals, as well as straightforward analytics which allow you to derive actionable information from calculations, reference lines, and forecasts as a result of your visuals.

3. Chartio

Chartio’s data visualization tools offer users 15 types of charts to choose from with multiple variations, and even more options if you know how to use data programming languages.

With Chartio, you can bring all your data together from locations like Amazon Redshift, browse your data with the Visual SQL solution, create and manage customized charts and visuals, and easily share them (via web page, Slack, PDF reports for email, etc.).

4. Databox

Databox provides a number of ways to upload your data and efficiently create visuals to derive conclusions.

There are over 70 integrations that can help you quickly and easily create visuals with pre-built dashboards and reports. You can also create custom metrics. Databox then allows you to connect to Google Sheets or an SQL database, or you can push it via API to view and share your data.

5. Google Chart Tools

Google Chart Tools allow you to visualize live data on your website (and mobile) with the help of a number of interactive, customizable charts and data tools. The most common way to use Google Charts is with simple JavaScript that you embed in your web page. And by using the DataTable class, you can easily switch between chart types.

Grow Better With Data Visualization

With data visualization, you’ll be able to identify, discuss, and act on insights in an easier and more effective way.

So, look to the examples above for inspiration (and as a reference for what to avoid, too!) and experiment with the many tools available to determine what works best for your needs and goals.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in March 2015 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Your value proposition is the core of your competitive advantage. It clearly articulates why someone would want to buy from your company instead of a competitor.

It’s also one of the most important conversion factors (learn all about conversion best practices with this free guide). A great value proposition could be the difference between losing a sale — and closing it.

So how do you actually write a value proposition that’s strong enough to lift conversion rates and sales? In this article, you’ll learn the definition of a value proposition, what a value prop isn’t, examples of some of the best value props we’ve seen and tactics to create amazing value props.

Ready to dive in?

Your value proposition is a unique identifier for your business. Without it, buyers won’t have a reason to purchase what you sell. They may even patronize a competitor simply because that business communicates its value proposition clearly in its marketing materials and sales process.

While your value prop should help differentiate you from the rest of the industry, keep in mind it’s not a slogan, tagline, or mission statement. Those types of copy are important accessories to your brand, but your potential customers and employees don’t choose one business over the other solely based on these elements.

Your value proposition goes deep into the problems you want to solve for buyers, and what makes your product or service the perfect solution.

The Elements of a Value Proposition

There are three main elements of a value proposition: the headline, the subheadline, and a visual element.

Headline

The headline of your value proposition describes the benefit the customer will receive as a result of making a purchase from your business. The headline can be creative and catchy, but it should be clear and concise, first and foremost.

Subheadline or Paragraph

The subheadline or paragraph should explain in detail what your company offers, who it serves, and why. In this section, you can elaborate on the information in the headline.

Visual Element

In some cases, a video, infographic, or image may convey your value proposition better than words alone can. Enhance your message with these visual elements to capture your audience’s attention.

Taking these three elements into consideration, you’ll be able to make your own after you build a value proposition canvas.

The value proposition canvas is made up of two major components: the customer profile and the value map.

Customer Profile

The customer profile makes up the first half of the value proposition canvas. When performing this exercise you’ll want to start with this section first so that their wants and needs can influence the overall value proposition canvas.

The customer profile consists of three areas that we’ll detail below.

Customer Jobs

What is the task your customer needs to complete or the problem they’re trying to solve with your product or service? The answer to this question sums up the “customer job” or the purpose of your product or service in the eyes of the customer.

Customer Expectations

No matter what you sell, your ideal customer will have an expectation of what that product or service will do for them. In this section, you’ll use research to explain what your customers expect from you in order to purchase your product.

Pain Points

As your customer completes their “customer job,” what pains do they experience? Do they take any risks while they do the customer’s job? Do they experience any negative emotions? These pain points should be considered so that you include the most helpful products and services on the value map side of the value proposition canvas.

Value Map

In this section of the value proposition canvas, three specific sectors help describe what the business offers to the customer.

Gain Creators

These are features your products or services have that make the customer happy. Think creatively about the elements of happiness your customers experience. Consider their financial and social goals as well as their psychographics.

Pain Relievers

In the section above, we discussed customer pains. This section will define exactly how your business will help them overcome those pain points.

Products & Services

While this section won’t list every single product or service your company offers, it should include the ones that will create the most gain and alleviate the most pains for your customers.

Determine Value Proposition-Customer Fit

Once you’ve completed the value proposition canvas exercise, the next step will be to determine how your value proposition fits within the customer profile. To do this, you’ll use a ranking process that prioritizes products and services based on how well they address the customer profile.

To better visualize these tools, here’s a couple templates to follow when formatting a value proposition.

Value Proposition Templates

Featured Resource: 15 Value Proposition Templates

Download for Free

We’ve crafted 15 templates to help you create an amazing value proposition for your brand – and pairing each of them with an example of how they may look for a real business. Click here to download these free value proposition templates for your business.

Now that we’ve reviewed the elements, visual tools, and templates — let’s look at some brand examples that effectively identify and satisfy its customer needs.

Value Proposition Examples

Because value propositions are typically internal information and rarely stated publicly, finding a value proposition example to model yours after can be difficult. We’ve taken the liberty of using the value proposition canvas and applying it to some successful companies that have been recognized by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ASCI).

In these examples, you’ll see real-world instances of customer gains and pains aligned with well-known products and services offered by these companies.

1. FedEx: Manage Your Home Deliveries

Headline: Manage Your Home Deliveries

Subheadline/Paragraph: Sending and receiving packages is convenient and safe for individuals who want to ship ideas and innovations across the globe.

Visual Element:

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Customer Profile for FedEx

• Customer Jobs: FedEx customers want to share ideas and innovations with other individuals by shipping goods around the world.
• Gains: Customers want a hassle-free way to return online orders and are looking for a safe and secure way to receive their packages.
• Pains: Returning a package at a FedEx shipping center can be inconvenient, and managing home deliveries can be a hassle.

Value Map for FedEx

• Gain Creators: Customers can drop off their FedEx packages at places they shop most like Walgreens or Dollar General, and have peace of mind knowing where their package is at all times.
• Pain Relievers: Thousands of FedEx drop-off locations across the country, receive notifications when a package is en route and inform the driver where to leave the package.
• Products & Services: FedEx Drop Box locations make returning packages convenient, and the FedEx Delivery Manager reroutes or reschedules deliveries to work with the customer’s schedule.

2. LG: State-of-the-art Living Experience

Headline: State-of-the-art Living Experience

Subheadline/Paragraph: LG SIGNATURE delivers an innovative product design that creates an exceptional living experience for people who want to achieve a state-of-the-art living experience.

Visual Element:

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Customer Profile for LG

• Customer Jobs: LG customers want simple, yet innovative technology that helps them achieve a state-of-the-art living experience.
• Gains: Customers have an intuitive and responsive experience with each appliance they interact with inside their homes.
• Pains: There are too many unnecessary buttons and features on appliances that get in the way of a simple living experience

Value Map for LG.

• Gain Creators: Customers can use technology to enhance their home experience without needing to read a manual.
• Pain Relievers: LG offers a simple design that focuses on the user and their lifestyle.
• Products & Services: LG SIGNATURE delivers an innovative product design that creates an exceptional living experience.

3. Subaru: The most adventurous, most reliable, safest, best Subaru Outback ever.

Headline: The most adventurous, most reliable, safest, best Subaru Outback ever.

Subheadline/paragraph: The 2022 Subaru Outback takes drivers to the most adventurous places in style with the most advanced safety technology.

Visual element:

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Customer Profile for Subaru

• Customer Jobs: Subaru customers want to explore the world’s most adventurous places in a reliable and safe vehicle
• Gains: Customers want to explore the land in a stylish and spacious SUV and look for advanced technological elements in their vehicles that enhance performance and safety
• Pains: The safest vehicles are not the most visually appealing, and some SUVs aren’t equipped for all-weather or all-terrain environments

Value Map for Subaru

• Gain Creators: Subarus have a stylish exterior and interior with ample ground clearance that protects the vehicle against damage from the environment and advanced technology to reduce crashes and make long road trips safer.
• Pain Relievers: Subarus have a rugged blacked-out trim for style and protection, 9.5-inch ground clearance for better stability and performance, driver-assist technology that helps drivers see better, prevent crashes, manage cruise control, and brake automatically in emergency situations.
• Products & Services: The 2022 Subaru Outback with standard eyesight assist technology, automatic pre-collision braking, adaptive cruise control, lane-centering, and is one of the brand’s most popular models.

Samsung: Get Ready to Unfold Your World

Headline: Get Ready to Unfold Your World

Subheadline/paragraph: This is everything you’d want in a premium, durable, 5G smartphone. Then we made it unfold — revealing a massive screen so you can watch, work and play like never before.

Visual element:

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Customer Profile for Samsung

• Customer Jobs: Samsung customers are tech-savvy and follow the latest trends, driven by efficiency and aspirational lifestyles.
• Gains: Customers want an all-in-one way to enjoy media, work productively, and have a fun experience all in the palm of their hands.
• Pains: Common smartphones have size limitations that strain entertainment viewing, gameplay, and work capabilities.

Value Map for Samsung

• Gain Creators: Samsung offers a unique and expansive design with capabilities beyond that of an average smartphone, offering the most advanced technology to help customers perform tasks to fulfill work and play.
• Pain Relievers: Samsung provides a smartphone that displays content in tablet-like viewing and displays up to three apps simultaneously.
• Products & Services: One of Samsung’s most popular phones is the Galaxy Z Fold3 5G folding 6.2-inch smartphone with dynamic AMOLED 2X screens, ultra-thin glass with S Penfold edition, and super-strong lightweight armor aluminum frame.

You’ve seen some brilliant value proposition examples, now let’s break down how to make your own.

Step 1: Identify your customer’s main problem.

While this will require some upfront research, you can get a head start on this aspect of the value proposition by speaking with different members of your team. Customer service reps, marketing specialists, and salespeople can fill in the gaps about what problems your customers are looking to solve by using your product or service.

For example, let’s say your business sells tax software on a subscription basis and automated templates are included in the software package. Your ideal customer is looking for an affordable and user-friendly way to access complicated tax documents for their business. In this example, your business’s offerings could be the solution they need.

Step 2: Identify all the benefits your products offer.

This step can be as simple as listing out every product you sell and describing its primary benefit. The benefit should be concise and focused on a single customer need.

In our tax software example, you’d list each tax template, explain the benefit it provides, and why a customer would need it.

Step 3: Describe what makes these benefits valuable.

Next, add another sentence that explains why this benefit matters to the customer.

Using the same example above, the value would be that customers have affordable tax documentation at their fingertips — something that would normally cost them thousands of dollars.

Step 4: Connect this value to your buyer’s problem.

Next, pair the buyer’s problem to the elements that make your product or service valuable. Do they align? If so, you’re ready to refine your value proposition to differentiate your offerings from the competition. If they don’t align, repeat the steps above until you find a valid buyer need and a viable solution your business offers to meet that need.

There’re three templates we think do an excellent job of connecting value to buyer pain points:

Step 5: Differentiate yourself as the preferred provider of this value.

Finally, polish your value proposition to make it unique. Is there a specific customer service offering your business provides that others don’t? Do you offer any additional services that other companies charge for? These elements can help differentiate your value proposition from competitors while keeping the focus on the buyer’s needs.

Once you understand these steps, you can easily implement them into value proposition templates as follows.

Value Proposition Templates

• Steve Blank Method

Instead of focusing on the features themselves, Blank saw the need to emphasize the benefits derived from the features in a simple sentence. By following this formula you’ll connect the target market and their pain points to the solution:

“We help (X) do (Y) by doing (Z)”

• Geoff Moore Method

Moore provides a template that’s more specific in identifying the industry categories alongside the benefits customers value. This makes a more clear value proposition formula as follows:

“For [target customer] who [needs or wants X], our [product/service] is [category of industry] that [benefits]”

• Harvard Business School Method

According to HBS a value proposition is executed best when it answers the following questions:

What is my brand offering?

What job does the customer hire my brand to do?

What companies and products compete with my brand to do this job for the customer?

What sets my brand apart from competitors?

Now that we’ve gone through steps and templates to follow, there’s some tactics we think you should keep in mind.

1. Conduct research to determine the value proposition of your competitors.

Because your value proposition is the differentiating factor between your business and the competition, it’s important to research the propositions of your closest competitors. You can use the value proposition canvas in this post to determine how each company meets the needs of your buyer persona.

Be honest here — it’s tempting to focus on the areas in which your competition doesn’t excel, but you’ll have a better idea of where your product or service fits within the market if you key in on your competitors’ strengths.

2. Explain the value of your products and services.

You’re probably familiar with outlining the features and benefits of your product and service offerings. This tactic takes that concept a step further. By matching the benefits of your offerings to specific values that your customers have, you’ll be able to align what your business provides with what your customers need.

3. Describe the benefits your ideal customer will experience when they choose your product or service over the competition.

When crafting this part of your value proposition, include details about how your product or service will benefit the customer and use examples where you can. Videos, photos, and live demonstrations are all effective ways to illustrate your value proposition because they show the customer exactly what they can expect from your business.

4. Develop a unique value proposition for each buyer persona you serve.

Ideally, you’ll be focusing your marketing efforts on a specific target audience. You’ll also find that this audience will have different needs based on their buying behaviors. Buyer personas can help you segment your larger audience into groups of customers with similar desires, goals, pain points, and buying behaviors. As a result, you’ll need a unique value proposition for each persona. Different products and services you offer may solve certain customer pain points better than others, so developing a value proposition for each persona will better serve each one.

5. Test your value proposition with your audience using various marketing channels.

Each of these tactics will likely be developed internally by your team which means you’ll want to validate your work with your target audience. Your value proposition will be communicated through various marketing channels like your website, social media accounts, video, audio, and in person. Test your proposition with members of your audience (both existing customers and non-customers) using each of these channels. Tools like UserTesting can help you streamline this feedback process so that you can implement changes quickly to finalize your value proposition.

We know the makings of a value proposition, so how can you make it a good one? Here’s the last three tips we have for you.

What makes a good value proposition?

Clear Language

Your value proposition should aim to address a primary customer need. This limited focus helps keep your value proposition clear and easy to understand. With just one main idea to comprehend, your audience will be able to quickly decide whether or not your product or service will be the best solution for them.

Specific Outcomes

Next, you’ll want to communicate the specific outcomes your customer can expect to receive from your product or service. Will they save time? Demonstrate how. Will their workflow become more manageable? Show a before and after workflow diagram. The specific outcomes will be critical components of your value proposition as they’ll exemplify exactly how your customers will use your solution to solve their problems.

Points of Differentiation

Not only are your potential customers evaluating your business’s offerings based on their own needs, but they’re also comparing what you offer against competitors. As a result, your value proposition will need to include detailed points of differentiation. These key points will help customers understand exactly what sets your company apart.

Compose a Remarkable Value Proposition

The factors that influence a potential customer to become a loyal customer are limited. Whether your industry has a lot of opportunities to differentiate (like retail) or virtually no unique identifiers (like dairy), you’ll find that a value proposition will help you understand your ideal customer and position your business as the best solution for their needs. Use the tactics, tips, framework, and examples in this post to craft your unique value proposition.

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