Category Archives: B2B

Here’s the thing about resumes and cover letters: No matter how unique you try to make your own, for the most part, they tend to read dry. And there’s a good reason for it: It’s supposed to be a single, no-frills page that documents your work experience. And while being concise is good, there’s very little opportunity to convey your uniqueness, or for your personality to shine through at all for that matter.

While a resume is a sole, largely unchanging document, a personal website can be customized and updated according to what you’re working on, or what you want to emphasize. It’s both fluid and current.

Did you know 80% of businesses say a personal website is important when evaluating job candidates? Recruiters are looking you up online, and a personal website that tells the story you want to tell can make all the difference between you and a competing candidate.

If you’re thinking about creating a personal website of your very own, check out the examples below that hit the nail on the head. Inspired by a particular type of website? Click one of the following links to jump to that section of this article:

• Personal Resume Websites
• Personal Portfolios
• Personal Blogs
• Personal Demo Websites

Personal Resume Websites

Whether you create a single-page site or a larger portfolio, the web resume serves as a more personalized option for sharing information and demonstrating your technological skills — and it can be used by all types of job seekers.

Even if you have very little work experience, you can leverage a website to build a better picture of your capabilities and yourself as a candidate, while leaning on your traditional resume to provide the basic background information.

1. Gary Sheng

Unlike a standard resume document, Sheng’s website makes it easy for him to include logos and clickable links that allow his software engineering and web development skills to shine.

We love that visitors can choose to scroll down his page to view all of the website’s categories (“About Me,” “My Passion,” etc.), or jump to a specific page using the top navigation.

The “My System” section reads like a company mission statement, and this personal touch helps humanize his work and make him more memorable.

2. Brandon Johnson

Johnson’s incredible resume must be seen to be believed. Beautiful images of planets help to complement his planetary science background, and animations make his resume more of an experience than a document.

In terms of design, the textured, multi-layered background adds greater depth to the two-dimensional page in a way that evokes feelings of space and the planetary systems, which Johnson’s work focuses on.

3. Quinton Harris

Harris’ resume uses photos to tell his personal story — and it reads kind of like a cool, digital scrapbook. It covers all the bases of a resume — and then some — by discussing his educational background, work experience, and skills in a highly visual way.

Not to mention, the copy is fantastic. It’s clear that Harris took the time to carefully choose the right words to describe each step of his personal and professional journey. For example, the section on storytelling reads:

NYC, my new home, is filled with the necessary secrets to not only propel my craft forward, but my identity as an artist. With every lens snapped and every pixel laid, I am becoming me.

Finally, at the final navigational point (note the scrolling circles on the left-hand side of the page), users are redirected to quintonharris.com, where he goes on to tell his story in more detail.

Best Practices for Resume Websites

1. Code your resume so it can be crawled by search engines.
2. Offer a button to download your resume in PDF so the hiring manager can add it to your file.
3. Keep branding consistent between the website and document versions: Use similar fonts, colors, and images so you’re easy to recognize.
4. Be creative and authentic to yourself. Think about the colors, images, and media you want to be a part of your story that you couldn’t include in a document resume.

Personal Portfolios

Building an online portfolio is a highly useful personal branding and marketing tool if your work experience and skill set call for content creation. In fact, photographers, graphic designers, illustrators, writers, and content marketers can all use web portfolios to show off their skills in a more user-friendly way than a resume or hard copy portfolio.

4. Sean Halpin

Halpin’s portfolio is short, sweet, and to the point, which is authentic to his voice and personal branding outlined on the site. Instead of a lot of copy, Halpin presents large thumbnail cards so that his projects speak for themselves and allow the user to delve deeper if one catches their eye.

5. Tony D’Orio

It’s important to keep the design of your visual portfolio simple to let images capture visitors’ attention, and D’Orio accomplishes this by featuring bold photographs front-and-center on his website. His logo and navigation menu are clear and don’t distract from his work. And he makes it easy for potential customers to download his work free of charge.

Want to give it a try? Click on the hamburger menu in the top left corner, then select + Create a PDF to select as many images as you’d like to download.

Once you open the PDF, you’ll notice that it comes fully equipped with D’Orio’s business card as the cover … just in case you need it.

6. Verena Michelitsch

When you’re a designer, not one pixel on your personal website should go unused. Verena Michelitsch’s portfolio, shown above, is covered end to end in artwork. From her extensive library of work, she chose to exhibit multiple colors, styles, and dimensions so visitors can see just how much range she has as a designer. It’s a perfect example of the classic adage, “show, don’t tell.”

7. Gari Cruze

Cruze is a copywriter. But by turning his website into a portfolio featuring images from different campaigns he’s worked on, he makes visitors want to keep clicking to learn more about him. Also, there’s a great CTA at the top of the page that leads visitors to his latest blog post.

His site’s humorous copy — specifically in the “17 Random Things” and “Oh Yes, They’re Talking” sections — serves to show off his skills, while making himself more memorable as well. These pages also include his contact information on the right-hand side, making it easy to reach out and connect at any point:

8. Melanie Daveid

Daveid’s website is a great example of “less is more.”

This developer’s portfolio features clear, well-branded imagery of campaigns and apps that Daveid worked on, and she shows off her coding skills when you click through to see the specifics of her work.

While it might seem overly minimal to only include three examples of her work, Daveid did her portfolio a service by including her best, most noteworthy campaigns. At the end of the day, it’s better to have fewer examples of excellence in your portfolio than many examples of mediocrity.

9. The Beast Is Back

Christopher Lee’s portfolio is busy and colorful in a way that works. When you read more about Lee on his easily navigable site, you realize that such a fun and vibrant homepage is perfect for an illustrator and toy designer.

Known by his brand name, “The Beast Is Back,” Lee’s web portfolio highlights eye-catching designs with recognizable brands, such as Target and Mario, along with links to purchase his work. This is another gallery-style portfolio with pops of color that make it fun and give it personality, thus making it more memorable.

10. Daniel Grindrod

This freelance videographer is another example of a simple but sleek portfolio, allowing his potential clients to browse deeper into his “Work” and “Stills” sections. The opening video on the homepage — as shown on the still image above — also ensures his site visitors that he’s actively creating beautiful work.

Best Practices for Portfolio Websites

1. Use mainly visuals. Even if you’re showcasing your written work, using logos or other branding is more eye-catching for your visitors.
2. Don’t be afraid to be yourself. Your personality, style, and sense of humor could be what sets you apart from other sites!
3. Organization is key. If your portfolio is full of photos, logos, and other images, make sure it’s easy for visitors to navigate to where they can contact you.
4. Brand yourself. Choose a logo or icon to make your information easily identifiable.

Personal Blogs

Consistently publishing on a blog is a great way to attract attention on social media and search engines — and drive traffic to your site. Blogging is a smart way to give your work a personality, chronicle your experiences, and stretch your writing muscles. You might write a personal blog if you’re a writer by trade, but virtually anyone can benefit from adding a blog to their site and providing useful content for their audience.

11. The Everywhereist

This blog looks a bit busier, but its consistent branding helps visitors easily navigate the site. The travel blog uses globe iconography to move visitors around the site, making it easy to explore sections beyond the blog.

Owned by writer Geraldine DeRuiter, this blog also features a “Best Of” section that allows new visitors to learn about what the blog covers to get acclimated. The color scheme is warm, neutral, and free of excess clutter that could distract from the content.

12. Side Hustle Nation

Side Hustle Nation is the business blog of Nick Loper, an advisor whose website offers tons of valuable financial advice for individual business owners. His homepage, shown above, sets a lighthearted yet passionate tone for his readers. It suggests you’ll get friendly content all committed to a single goal: financial freedom. The green call to action, “Start Here,” helps first-time visitors know exactly how to navigate his website.

On Nick’s blog page, shown above, you’ll notice two unique types of content: “My Podcast Production Process,” the top post; and “Quarterly Progress Report,” the third post down. The top post shows readers how Nick, himself, creates content that helps his business grow, while the third post down keeps his readers up to date on his blog’s growth over time. These content types give people a peek behind the curtain of your operation, showing them you practice what you preach and that your insight is tried and true.

13. fifty coffees

The website fifty coffees chronicles the author’s series of coffee meetings in search of her next job opportunity, and it does a great job of using photography and visuals to assist in the telling of her lengthy stories.

The best part? Each post ends with numbered takeaways from her meetings for ease of reading comprehension. The high-quality photography used to complement the stories is like icing on the cake.

14. Minimalist Baker

I’m not highlighting Dana’s food blog just because the food looks delicious and I’m hungry. Her blog uses a simple white background to let her food photography pop, unique branding to make her memorable, and mini-bio to personalize her website.

15. Mr. Money Mustache

Mr. Money Mustache might take on an old-school, Gangs of New York-style facade, but his blog design — and the advice the blog offers — couldn’t be more fresh (he also doesn’t really look like that).

This financial blog is a funny, browsable website that offers sound insight into money management for the layperson. While his personal stories help support the legitimacy of his advice, the navigation links surrounding his logo make it easy to jump right into his content without any prior context around his brand.

Best Practices for Blogs

1. Keep your site simple and clutter-free to avoid additional distractions beyond blog posts.
2. Publish often. Those who prioritize marketing efforts are 13x more likely to see positive ROI.
3. Experiment with different blog styles, such as lists, interviews, graphics, and bullets.
4. Employ visuals to break up text and add context to your discussion.

Personal Demo Websites

Another cool way to promote yourself and your skills is to create a personal website that doubles as a demonstration of your coding, design, illustration, or developer skills. These sites can be interactive and animated in a way that provides information about you and also shows hiring managers why they should work with you. This is a great website option for technical and artistic content creators such as developers, animators, UX designers, website content managers, and illustrators.

16. Albino Tonnina

Tonnina is showcasing advanced and complicated web development skills, but the images and storytelling methods he uses are simple and easy to understand. In the process, you get a demo of the depth of his animation and coding experience.

17. Robby Leonardi

Leonardi’s incredible demo website uses animation and web development skills to turn his portfolio and resume into a video game for site visitors. The whimsical branding and unique way of sharing information ensure that his site is memorable to visitors.

18. Samuel Reed

Reed uses his page as a start-to-finish demo of how to code a website. His website starts as a blank white page and ends as a fully interactive site that visitors can watch him code themselves. The cool factor makes this website memorable, and it makes his skills extremely marketable.

19. Devon Stank

Stank’s demo site does a great job of showing that he has the web design chops and it takes it a step further by telling visitors all about him, his agency, and his passions. It’s the perfect balance of a demo and a mini-resume.

Plus, we love the video he includes as an intro. It’s a consumable narrative that at once captures Stank’s personality and credentials.

Best Practices for Demo Websites

1. Brand yourself and use consistent logos and colors to identify your name and your skills amongst the bevy of visuals.
2. Don’t overwhelm your visitors with too many visuals at once — especially if your demo is animated. Be sure to keep imagery easy to understand so visitors aren’t bombarded when they visit your site.

Developing a Personal Website

Regardless of the type of personal website you’re building, there’s plenty of inspiration above on how to convey personality while connecting with your audience. Keep in the above tips in mind, remember to design for your audience’s experience, and most importantly have fun.

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

The other day, I roamed the aisles of CVS and picked up the same toothpaste I’ve been buying for years.

I didn’t think twice about it. I made the purchase on auto-pilot. I didn’t consider testing out a different brand or purchasing one from another retailer.

Toothpaste, as it turns out, is known as a “convenience good,” which consumers usually buy without putting too much thought into the brand or effort.

Understanding product classification is key to uncovering the reasons behind your consumers’ general buying behaviors and how you can better market your products as a result.

There are four types of product classification. Let’s dive into each type, so you can determine where your product falls.

Product Classification in Marketing

Knowing the classification of a product is vital when devising a marketing strategy. Why? Well, it lets you know the mindset most consumers have and the behavior they exhibit when interacting with your product.

This knowledge arms you to devise an effective marketing strategy that will meet your consumers where they are. It also helps you decide on a realistic marketing budget.

For instance, say your products fall under the “unsought goods” classification (more on that in this section). This means that you’ll likely need to take a more aggressive marketing approach to reach consumers that may not have considered your product or brand.

Think of charity organizations, life insurance companies, and funeral homes. These are usually not top of mind for consumers. As such, these brands must work a little harder to be visible to consumers and highlight the benefits of their goods or services.

Shopping goods, on the other hand, are highly visible and very competitive. Consumers typically spend time comparing quality, cost, and value before making a purchase. That’s why building brand loyalty is vital for this product classification.

As you can see, there are factors to consider for every classification of product. The more familiar you are with consumer habits and beliefs for that category, the more equipped you will be to market your product.

There are four types of products and each is classified based on consumer habits, price, and product characteristics: convenience goods, shopping goods, specialty products, and unsought goods.

Let’s dive into each one in more detail.

1. Convenience Goods

Like the Crest toothpaste example, convenience goods are products that consumers purchase repeatedly and without much thought.

Once consumers choose their brand of choice, they typically stick to it unless they see a reason to switch, such as an interesting advertisement that compels them to try it or convenient placement at the checkout aisle.

These products include gum, toilet paper, soap, toothpaste, shampoo, milk, and other necessities that people buy regularly.

To market a convenience good, you want to consider that most people will impulse buy these products. Placing your products near the checkout line at a store could be a good idea for these products — which is why you’ll often find candy and gum at the front of a store.

Since most convenience products are priced low, cost and discounting isn’t a major deciding factor when considering a purchase. I won’t switch my toilet paper brand just to save a few cents.

For convenience goods, brand recognition is key. With this in mind, you’ll want to implement widespread campaigns to spread awareness of your company if possible.

For instance, Charmin, the toilet paper brand, is a widely recognized brand in the United States — likely in part due to the company’s consistent and long-term advertising strategy, dating back to the 1960’s with the invention of the character “Mr. Whipple” who appeared on TV, print, and radio ads.

2. Shopping Goods

Shopping goods are commodities consumers typically spend more time researching and comparing before purchase.

They can range from affordable items, like clothes and home decor, to higher-end goods like cars and houses.

These are more one-off purchases with a higher economic impact.

For instance, while you will buy toilet paper over and over again for the rest of your life, you’ll likely only purchase a house a few times at most. And, since it’s an expensive and important purchase, you’ll spend a good amount of time deliberating on it, attending different open houses, and comparing the pros and cons of your final selection.

The same can be said for smaller products. If you have an event coming up and you want to purchase a nice pair of shoes, this doesn’t fall under impulse purchases.

Instead, you’ll want to try it on, consider whether the price is worth it, and even get input from your loved ones.

To market a shopping good, invest in content that persuades your buyer of your product’s value. It’s important your marketing materials demonstrate how your product differs from the competition, and the unique value it provides consumers.

Price also plays a role in this product type, so the promotion of discounts and sales can attract consumers toward your brand.

3. Specialty Goods

A specialty good is the only product of its kind on the market, which means consumers typically don’t feel the need to compare and deliberate as much as they would with shopping products.

A good example of this? iPhones.

I’ve been purchasing new iPhones for years, and I haven’t paused to consider other smartphone models — because of Apple’s strong brand identity and the perception I have of its product quality.

When marketing a specialty good, you don’t necessarily need to spend too much time convincing consumers that your product is different from competitors. They already know already.

Instead, focus on how your products are constantly innovating and improving. This will ensure your customers will remain loyal to your brand.

For instance, if Apple stopped making impressive improvements on their iPhones and promoting new features, I might consider switching brands. But since they’ve continued to impress me over the years, I’ve continued to purchase from them.

4. Unsought Goods

Finally, unsought products — goods that people aren’t typically excited to buy. Good examples of unsought goods include fire extinguishers, batteries, and life insurance.

People will typically buy an unsought good out of a sense of fear or danger. For instance, you wouldn’t go on the market looking for the “new and best” fire extinguisher. You’d only purchase one due to the fear of a potential fire. Alternatively, some unsought goods, like batteries, are bought simply because the old ones expired or ran out.

When marketing an unsought good, focus on reminding consumers of the existence of your product, and convincing consumers that purchasing your product will leave them with a better sense of security.

For instance, Duracell’s Beach x Bear commercial encourages viewers to remember the importance of batteries in life-threatening situations, like impending bear attacks or when using a metal detector.

Product Classification Examples

1. Browndages

Browndages is a convenience goods brand that markets itself by highlighting its key feature: bandages for every skin tone.

Messaging like “The perfect bandage for brown skin,” can be seen on the brand’s website, packaging and social media platforms, making it stand out against competitors like Band-Aid that typically focus its product’s medical benefits.

2. State Farm Insurance

Like many insurance companies, State Farm falls under the “unsought goods” product classification.

As such, brand and product awareness is a priority when it comes to marketing.

In its marketing efforts, State Farm, formerly AllState, positions itself as a reliable and trustworthy partner to rely on when bad things happen in your life.

In this example, the brand spotlights a fear many car owners have — a popular tactic used by unsought goods brands — while mentioning why trusting this brand will make things go smoothly.

3. Energizer

For many consumers, the first thing they think of when they picture batteries is a pink rabbit holding a drumset.

Similar to Charmin, Energizer created a brand mascot that consumers could easily recognize and remember: the Energizer Bunny.

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As a convenience good, Energizer needed to increase its brand recognition so that it could stand out among competitors in the store.

Now, the brand is widely popular and this is likely due to this marketing tactic.

4. Oui The People

For products under the “shopping goods” classification, it’s imperative that you identify ways to stand out among your competitors.

Why? Because, when shopping for these products, consumers compare everything: features, cost, value. As such, you must offer something that other brands don’t – whether that relates to your product features, brand values, or mission.

For Oui The People, sustainability is at the center of its brand.

Consumers who care about the environment will gravitate toward the brand because of its use of recyclable material for its products and packaging.

5. Pyer Moss

As mentioned before, when people purchase specialty products, they’re not looking to be convinced of their quality or value. That’s already clear.

What consumers are looking for instead is a brand identity they can relate to, a vision they identify with.

Luxury clothing company Pyer Moss attracts consumers with its refreshing and innovative take on fashion. The brand isn’t afraid to step outside of the norm while still remaining rooted in its heritage.

Now that you know where your product fits, use consumers’ buyer behavior to inspire your next marketing campaign. Now it’s time to figure out how you can meet — and exceed — customers’ expectations of your product.

Editor’s Note: This blog post was originally published in August 2020, but has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Imagine this: You’re a project manager at a boutique marketing firm tasked with training the new PM and getting them up to speed on how to do their job to meet expectations.

To fulfill this request, you probably had to learn a series of actions already set in place. That series of actions is called a standard operating procedure, or SOP for short, and they help to routinize job functions.

As your company requires more standardized processes to run, such as managing your iPaaS integrations or building email campaigns, SOPs become invaluable for keeping everything in-line.

In this guide, we’ll explain the basics of SOPs and how to write them. Then, we’ll recommend our favorite software tools for creating and executing SOPs. Let’s dive in.

SOP Example

A good SOP is clearly worded and easy to read. Well-written SOPs have steps that are short and simple and are usually presented in a clearly labeled document.

Below is an example of a generic SOP for a new vehicle purchase process. As shown, each section is clearly labeled for fast reading and clear comprehension.

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Let’s discuss the specifics of this example in more detail.

Standard Operating Procedures Format

• Title: SOPs should always begin with a title that briefly but fully encapsulates the purpose of the document.
• Identification: This information should be placed near the top of the document for ID purposes, including any relevant ID numbers, department names, and necessary signatures.
• Purpose: If a reader wants to understand the SOP more deeply before reading on, the “Purpose” section gives a brief summary of what the SOP aims to explain. This section probably won’t need to be longer than a paragraph.
• Definitions: If necessary, include definitions of jargon that the reader should know before they begin.
• Procedure: The format of the procedure section will vary depending on the complexity of the process. For simpler step-by-step processes, a numbered list will work. You may need to add sub-steps if the user must decide between two or more steps at a given point. If your SOP involves many decisions and forks, a flowchart is likely a more suitable format.

1. Create a list of processes

To begin, come up with an in-depth list of functions employees perform for their jobs that need SOPs. Some departments that could benefit from SOPs include finance, legal, HR, customer service, and IT. Think about those jobs that have a strict protocol; where not missing one step is vital.

For example, a new public relations professional would need to know the processes of writing press releases and securing press for their company. This is a great reason for creating an SOP.

2. Format your process

You can get creative with how you present SOPs. As long as they are easy to understand, there are no bounds to how a workflow can be created. The most widely seen SOP formats include step-by-step documents, workflow diagrams, organizational charts, detailed instructions, and checklists.

What kind of format would the public relations professional best receive their SOP? Most likely a workflow diagram. This would allow them to see why they must complete one step in order to get to the next. From writing the headline at the top to including correct hyperlinks, every step would be clearly notated.

3. Communicate

Make sure the process you write is accurate. Talk to the employees who will be using it every day. Ask for their feedback and advice. If they can provide useful edits or tips that would make the SOP easier to understand, include them.

For example, a reliable source for an SOP on how to write a solid press release would likely be a senior publicist or manager at the company

3. Write

Write the SOP by using the method that works best for your situation. Think about who you’re writing the SOP for and how the information will best be presented. This is also a good time to figure out who will be responsible for updating the SOP as needed.

A public relations professional would most likely benefit from an SOP about how to write press releases that give specific directions about format. For example, “Paragraph one must be 50-60 words introducing the album, the band, and their concept for the record cycle,” and “Paragraph two must be 30-40 words and include short descriptions of 2-3 songs.”

4. Implementation

SOPs should be updated at least once a year after implementation. They should always reflect the needs of the organization at that time. Maintaining them is important so employees always have the most up-to-date information about what’s expected from their day-to-day.

SOPs aren’t the quickest or shortest guides to write. But they can become a time-consuming project. Software can help speed up the writing process, and we’ve rounded up a couple of superstars:

(was a little unsure about the formatting for the list)

1. Trello

Price: Trello offers three pricing plans: Free, Business Class ($10 per user per month and recommended for teams up to 100 people), and Enterprise ($17.50 per user per month).

Trello is a scheduling tool that allows its users to see their collaboration using “cards,” which are like virtual sticky notes for each board. Trello can be used for organization; from editorial calendars to SOPs.

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We like Trello for its ease of having all documents in one place. If you scroll through this Office Management board, you can see a list of responsibilities for certain employees.

2. HubSpot

Price: HubSpot automation tools are included in Professional and Enterprise subscriptions of Marketing Hub, Service Hub, Sales Hub, and Operations Hub.

HubSpot’s CRM includes the workflows tool, which allows users to use marketing automation technology within their business. Workflows turn actions and/or commands into customizable flow charts.

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We like the workflows tool for SOPs because it has the option to write out lists into a visual chart.

3. Evernote

Price: Evernote offers three plans: Free, Personal ($7.99 per month), and Professional ($9.99 per month).

Evernote is a popular note-taking app that lets you do a lot more than take organized notes. It offers numerous organization, collaboration, and administration functions. The app also has a number of templates, including one for SOPs.

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We like Evernote because of its compatibility with different operating systems and organization capability.

4. Pipefy

Price: Pipefy offers four plans: Free, Business ($18 per user per month), Enterprise ($30 per user per month), and Unlimited (custom pricing).

Pipefy offers resources and tools for process management. Choose from an assortment of templates (seriously, there are so many), most of which are offered for free. There are a number of SOP templates that specify your organization’s needs, such as “Team Member Onboarding.”

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We love Pipefy because of its abundance of templates available and easy-to-understand template titles.

5. SweetProcess

Price: SweetProcess is $99 per month for teams of up to 20 people, plus $5 per month for each additional user. On the annual plan, this is reduced to $82.50 per month and $4.17 per month for each additional member.

SOP writing is SweetProcess’ main jam. Their tagline is, “Who said writing SOPs have to be painful?” so you can guarantee an easy-to-follow experience.

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Write SOPs That Rock

SOPs are fundamental to making internal processes run smoothly. They save time, help familiarize new employees with your processes, and keep experienced employees up-to-speed when your processes change. It’s worth putting in the time to make them clear, readable, and actionable.

For more free inspiration, click below to check out HubSpot’s section of easy-to-use templates.

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

In just 5 years, Daily Harvest, which provides healthy, easy-to-prep meals to customers based on algorithmic flavor preferences, disrupted the food industry and earned more than $250 million in revenue.

And, even before the acceleration in home food deliveries in 2020, the health and sustainability-conscious brand had already raked in $43 million in funding from investors who aligned with the company’s vision.

In a recent episode of HubSpot’s podcast, The Shake Up, our hosts Alexis Gay and Brianne Kimmel spoke with Daily Harvest founder and CEO Rachel Drori to learn what inspired her to build the brand, how she navigated investor pitching, how algorithms fuel the business, and how she thinks about the brand’s marketing mix.

Below are just a few highlights from the podcast:

Daily Harvest on Growing Its Brand and Customer Base

Daily Harvest’s Mission to Serve Healthy Food

[00:21:26] Rachel Drori: We’re not a meal kit. We’re more like a [00:21:30] modern CPG than a meal kit. Our food doesn’t rotate. You don’t have to really cook it. It’s already prepped.

[00:21:42] Alexis Gay: Would you say you’re defining a new category?

[00:21:45] Drori: Absolutely. I got into it because I’m absolutely a foodie. …. I wanted food that was convenient because that’s what makes fruits and vegetables hard. … But I also wanted food that was jam-packed with all the stuff that I know is good for me. … Hippocrates said, “Let food be thy medicine,” right? We’ve ended up with a Hippocratic oath for medicine being a medicine. Whereas food is kind of lost its way. So we’re really here to change that.

… The way that Big Food is set up is very systemically broken. … Investors in big food companies, the big CPGs of the world, are really focused on things like margin, accretion, and slow, steady returns dividends. … When you think about how that translates to food … it’s pretty ugly. And the way that they’re structurally set up is not to innovate. A case in point is Kraft in recent years, right? Their big innovation last year was launching pink macaroni and cheese. … They’ve just completely lost touch with the customer and they don’t have the structural agility to be able to move with modern times.

What drives demand for Daily Harvest?

[00:23:57] Gay: What drives the demand for your product? … Is it that younger generations are focusing on healthier food options? Is that the traditional family dinner is not as much part of our culture, is it because of the struggles of the restaurant industry? What do you think?

[00:24:15] Drori: I think there’s a few things. We’re kind of at the crossroads of a bunch of — I hate using this term — megatrends, right? … I think people are just smarter and there’s enough education out there where people are realizing that if I stick to the basics — like things my grandparents ate, things my great grandparents ate — then I’m going to be okay. So our whole food ethos is really based on this idea where we’re not going to tell you what not to eat.

… We are including everybody’s eating habits and everybody’s eating values, but we’re going to provide a base of fruits and vegetables. So our goal is to get everybody to eat more fruits and vegetables. And then, if you want to add a piece of chicken to your harvest bowl … we think that’s great.

Navigating Tricky Investment Pitches

[00:25:42] Gay: In 2017, you had $43 million in investments, which is incredible. But in order to get that type of cash infusion, it starts with a pitch. And I want to hear a little bit about one of those pitch meetings back then in 2017, how were you approaching, crafting the pitch around Daily Harvest?

[00:26:02] Drori: 2017 was the point when we felt like we had reached true product-market fit. So pre-fundraising — previous to that point — I would say it was incredibly difficult. People didn’t understand how the collections that we had laddered up to this bigger picture to this platform. There was a lot of friction in the fundraising process, especially because the people from who I was trying to raise money just didn’t see that there was a problem. They were like, “Well, why, why wouldn’t I just buy a Jamba Juice?” I’m like, “I don’t even know where to begin.”

[00:26:40] Gay: Did you ever feel discouraged

[00:26:41] Drori: After meetings like that? Oh, discouraged wouldn’t even cover it. I think that fundraising is the most demoralizing process.

[00:26:58] Gay: What was the key message you were really trying to land with the people you were seeking investment from.

[00:27:05] Drori: There were two things. The message I was trying to land was just this big picture. That big food is completely broken and that there’s this opportunity and that big food is not meeting customers. … Where I would say it got really tricky wasn’t necessarily with the problem statement. It really was that a lot of people got tripped up on the frozen.

[00:27:32] Gay: Why do you think that is?

[00:27:34] Drori: They still do, but everyone’s like, “Oh, so you’re disrupting frozen food?” and I’m like, “Soup is not a frozen category. Lattes are not a frozen category. Breakfast cereal is not a frozen category. How is that your logic?” Frozen is how we make food incredibly clean, unprocessed, convenient, and sustainable. … You know, we’re really trying to focus on that, that big picture to paint this story that we’re not going after frozen food.

… Eventually, we did it. The other thing that I was really looking for in that round was values alignment from our investors. … I wanted to make sure that we were never going to end up in a position where some of the investment community in big food causes a lot of health challenges. … There was a lot of insuring that our investors were going to have values that aligned as well.

Finding Like-Minded Investors

[00:29:10] Kimmel: How did you actually reverse the pitch and ask those investors questions to give you a real feel if they were going to add value and be a valuable person to help you scale Daily Harvest?

[00:29:25] Drori: One of the tricks, when you’re pitching, is that you’re also always selling. So one of the things that I did was I showed that there was great customer demand for these things — like sustainability is now table stakes. It wasn’t five years ago. Just showing where the customer demand was going and showing that there was also a business revenue opportunity tied to everything that we were hoping to do on the sustainability side … was a really important part of the story. Some of the questions that we asked just to make sure that people were aligned actually weren’t to the investors directly. it was always to other companies that they invested in and not the ones that they introduced us to.

… Those back-channel calls where you ask about a time where there was a really difficult decision that you had to weigh: Margins versus doing what was right for the customer, right? For me, that’s one of the hardest tensions and I was always going to focus on what was best for the customer — and what’s best for the Earth is also best for the customer.

Building Out the Business

[00:32:08] Kimmel: What were the next steps that had to happen to make Daily Harvest truly scalable?

[00:32:19] Drori: A lot of it sat in our supply chain. … We had a lot of amazing farmers that we engaged directly with. We still, to this day, do all of our own sourcing and work directly with everyone. But a lot of that story was very idealistic. …  It was a hard thing to do at that scale.

… Even like our packaging, right? We have these like grand plans to have completely home-compostable packaging. There’s a lot of storytelling there because there’s a scale problem. So you always have this chicken or egg problem when you’re talking about physical goods, where in order to make something cost-effective so that you can think about things like profitability, you have to have the scale to be able to justify those big swings.

Personalizing the Customer Experience

[00:34:15] Gay: A lot of companies that are offering food delivery in some capacity are keeping their offering really simple, focusing on just dinner or just one type of food. But you have over 60 items for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Was that a conscious decision you made to offer so many more?

[00:34:32] Drori: Because we have this direct link with our customers. What we’re able to do is we actually phenotype taste beds and we understand what every single customer wants and needs down to an incredible level of detail that allows us to create food for each individual. We don’t look at customers as averages. We really look at each individual and we create food to meet the needs of those customers.

… We have smoothies for different tastes, preferences, and different tea, eating values, and different profiles. As we expand into this collection depth, we see different groups consuming over different days. So it’s really systematic the way that we think about it. And it’s really served as well to increase share of stomach over time,as we’ve been able to take this data and turn it into meeting the needs of our customers.

[00:35:41] Gay: How did you build that?

[00:35:45] Drori: We have an incredible algorithms team who has really been a key part to our food delivery and then the personalization tied to that development to make sure that we’re matching the right people with the right food. That was creative.

[00:38:00] Kimmel: How do you balance qualitative insights as well? Like, do you have a great team that’s reading customer support tickets? Do you have focus groups? How do you collect a lot of Individual insights from each Daily Harvest user?

[00:38:14] Drori: There are two ways in which we do that. One is we have an incredibly passionate care team. … We’ve really emboldened our care team to be a part of this co-creation journey and adding the context behind what we’re seeing in the data. That’s a huge piece of what we do. Then we have a in-house research team that takes the data that we see and ties it together with the emotional, the psychological, the why behind what we’re seeing. … And it’s an incredibly powerful combination.

Daily Harvest’s Changing Marketing Mix

[00:41:20] Gay: I want to talk a little bit about your marketing mix. … In a world where startups rely so heavily on Facebook, Google, and Amazon for sales, you have invested in TV ads in influencer partnerships. … I would love to know what was your decision-making process in making some of those bets?

[00:42:11] Drori: It was easy to scale on Facebook. Now it’s a whole different ball of wax. The landscape has changed significantly … the landscape is always changing, it’s a complete moving target and something that works today will not work tomorrow. It’s just how you have to live in this world. We went out really aggressively into every channel you can imagine to give us that optionality and that agility where we can change our spend in different channels based on what happens to be working at the time.

… Influencer marketing is part of our mix, TV is a part of our mix, but I think the most important thing is — even if one thing is working really well — that you keep your spend and you keep the other channels engaged enough where if something changes you can always pivot and change that mix.

[00:43:57] Kimmel: How do you think about some of the branded Daily Harvest stuff versus like engaging with influencers and people that are likely to use Daily Harvest anyway, because it falls into like this new category of just easier, healthier.

[00:44:27] Drori: People always say like, “What’s the secret to your really fast growth?” And I actually talk about our supply chain, which is not the answer that people want to hear, but the reason why is … if you’ve ever seen a Rogers bell curve, it’s a normal bell curve, but if you think about the way normal product development works, you have an insight and then can take up to a year to ring something to market.

… Climbing up that curve, by the time you get to the top. That’s usually when big companies are going to market. Right? Our supply chain agility and our data allows us to go to market when an early adopter is interested in something and our early adopters because we listened to them, became these evangelists

… And what’s really powerful is that it spurs this virtuous marketing cycle that rides itself up that curve, as opposed to facing headwinds on the way down, where you have to like hire Justin Timberlake to shake his tushy on television. … Of course, we pay for some influencers, but really, what you’re seeing is us co-creating with our customers and our customers being so glad that we listened to them and gave them what they wanted.

To hear the full conversation or check out other episodes of The Shake Up, click here.

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

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

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

Content Marketing

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

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

So, what defines content marketing anyway?

Why is content marketing important?

• Educate your leads and prospects about the products and services you offer
• Boost conversions
• Build relationships between your customers and business that result in increased loyalty
• Show your audience how your products and services solve their challenges
• Create a sense of community around your brand

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

Types of Content Marketing

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

1. Social Media Content Marketing

With over 3.6 billion global social media users, it’s easy to understand why so many businesses invest in social media marketing. There are a number of platforms (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snapchat) to work with and several ways you can create and share content on each of them (e.g. photos, live videos, pre-recorded videos, stories).

Featured Resource: Social Media Content Calendar

2. Infographic Content Marketing

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

Featured Resource: 15 Free Infographic Templates

3. Blog Content Marketing

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

Featured Resource: Start a Successful Blog

4. Podcast Content Marketing

A 2020 survey found that 49% of 12-to-32-year-olds in the U.S. had listened to a podcast within the last month, with an average of six listening hours a week. For this reason, many businesses and media outlets have begun creating and sharing their own podcasts.

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

Featured Resource: How to Start a Podcast

5. Video Content Marketing

According to Wyzowl research, 69% of consumers say they prefer to learn about a brand’s product or service through video. Additionally, video marketing can boost conversions, improve ROI, and help you build relationships with audience members. You may choose to share your video content on social media platforms, landing pages, or on a co-marketer’s website.

Featured Resource: The Ultimate Video Marketing Starter Pack

6. Paid Ad Content Marketing

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

Featured Resource: The Ultimate Google Ads PPC Kit

Next, let’s look at some content marketing examples that are associated with those types of content marketing we just reviewed.

Content Marketing Examples

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

1. Example of Instagram Content Marketing

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

The Instagram page shares the Lush product line, displays different color and scent options for the products, and shows the various ways each product can be used. The profile feels and looks colorful and uniquely Lush, and depicts members of their wide customer base.

2. Example of Infographic Content Marketing

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IBM created an infographic when they launched their Cloud marketplace. Their infographic is on-brand, well-organized, and easy to read. It clearly explains what they’re doing with their Cloud marketplace and how customers can benefit from it. It also tells audience members how they can access the marketplace and get started using it.

3. Example of Blog Content Marketing

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Expedia has a blog called “[Out There Starts Here]” that shares travel-related information including hotel recommendations, great places to visit, and travel-related activities you can take part in around the globe.

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

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

4. Example of Podcast Content Marketing

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

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

5. Example of Video Content Marketing

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Much of Dollar Shave Club’s video content has gone viral. Their marketing efforts are on-brand, humorous, and entertaining. In fact, one of their videos has over 27 million views on YouTube. By establishing a name for themselves via online video content, Dollar Shave Club has experienced impressive growth and brand recognition.

6. Example of Paid Ad Content Marketing

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

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

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

7. Example of Twitter Content Marketing

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

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

8. Example of TikTok Content Marketing

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Chipotle is a very active brand on TikTok — the company uses the platform to reach and engage their customers and target audience members. In addition to reacting to others’ Chipotle-related TikTok content, the brand posts TikToks of their menu items, recipes, people enjoying their food, their restaurants, and more. They have over 1.6 million followers and over 30 million likes.

9. Example of Viral Content Marketing

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

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

You can think about your content marketing strategy as you would your content marketing plan — let’s dive into the steps you’ll want to work through in order to develop an effective strategy.

1. Set SMART goals.

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

Here are some SMART goal examples:

• Improve brand awareness
• Boost revenue
• Increase conversions
• Improve brand loyalty
• Increase customer engagement
• Build rapport and trust among prospects and customers
• Attract strategic partners

2. Determine your KPIs.

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

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

3. Decide on the type of content.

Next, choose the type of content you’ll create. To do this, start by thinking about your target audience and buyer personas.

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

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

Then, take a look back at the various types of content we reviewed earlier to decide which types of content you’ll create.

4. Choose your content channels.

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

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

5. Set a budget.

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

Then, ask yourself the following questions to determine your budget:

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

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

6. Create and distribute the content.

Create and distribute your content so your audience members can consume it — and possibly convert. To ensure you’re consistently producing content and sharing it among your prospects and customers, use a social media calendar or an editorial content calendar.

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

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

7. Analyze and measure results.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 Marketers to Follow on LinkedIn

1. LinkedIn: Luvvie Ajayi Jones

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

2. Zontee Hou

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

3. A. Lee Judge

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

3 Marketers to Follow on Twitter

4. Ann Handley

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

5. Neil Patel

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

6. Guy Kawasaki

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

Engage Your Target Audience With Content Marketing

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

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

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

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

Growing up, a few of my baseball coaches were some of the most ruthless and demanding people I’ve ever met. They used fear to push my team to our physical and emotional limits, intimidated us with cruel ultimatums, and didn’t really seem to care about us as people. They did everything they could to win — and punished us when we didn’t.

When I started doing internships in college, I expected my managers to be just like my coaches. Since businesses actually have to make money, and not just win a few games, I was scared to mess up.

But at the end of my last internship, I realized I’ve never really felt afraid to fail in the working world because my managers were the complete opposite of my coaches. They were patient, understanding, and, most of all, nice. It seemed like they cared about me just as much as they cared about their job, even though there’s a lot more at stake in the office than on a high school baseball field.

Although my managers have treated me well, there are still managers out there who are just like some of my baseball coaches: fear-mongering, intimidating, and mean. These tactics might produce short-term results, but, in the long-term, all they lead to are unhappy employees, underwhelming results, and a high turnover rate.

You don’t want to be a jerk at work, especially if you’re a manager, so check out this overview of the best leadership styles to adopt — and the worst ones to avoid.

1. Visionary Management Style

A visionary manager communicates a purpose and direction that her employees believe in, which convinces her team to work hard to execute her vision.

After setting their team’s vision and overarching strategy, visionary managers usually let their employees get to work on their own terms, as long as they’re productive. Managers will mainly check in on their team to make sure they’re on the right track or to share new insights.

This gives their employees a great sense of autonomy, which all managers need to provide — after all, self-direction is a basic psychological need. When humans work on tasks that they have more control over, they feel more satisfied and motivated to complete them. Letting their employees’ personal motivations determine the direction of their work is the best way for managers to boost their team’s engagement and confidence.

Visionary managers are also known to be firm yet fair. Their vision is usually set in place, but they’re always open to listening to their employees’ ideas and willing to change their plan if a great idea is presented.

To better execute their vision, visionary managers give a lot of feedback to their employees about their performance and praise them when their performance meets or exceeds expectations.

This type of management style is hard to pull off, though. It’s crucial that you sell your employees on the purpose of your vision before you expect them to execute it. If you don’t, they won’t be inspired to turn your vision into a reality.

Example of the Visionary Leadership Style in Action: Elon Musk

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It takes a clear vision and persistent leader like Elon Musk to transform a company like Tesla into the tech giant it is today. While some may mock the CEO’s cryptocurrency hobby and scoff at his larger-than-life plans to send everyday people to space, there’s no denying that his visionary leadership style has impacted not only his employees but the global community.

2. Democratic Management Style

In democratic management, the majority rules. Managers let their employees participate in the decision-making process because they value their team’s diversity of ideas, and understand that people are the key to a team’s success.

Democratic managers ultimately approve of all decisions, but since their employees are so involved in the decision-making process, their team has a lot of influence in their manager’s decision.

Employees are so heavily involved in the decision-making process because managers know it makes their team feel valued, boosts their morale, and forges a healthy, trusting relationship between the two. It also makes it easier for managers to convince their employees to buy into a team’s vision — after all, they’re executing a plan that they’ve created together.

Many employees like this leadership style because their managers trust them with a lot of responsibility and real work, which lets them use their skills to their full potential.

But when executed poorly, a democratic management style can be inefficient. Managers who keep mulling over a decision even after consulting their whole team about it can slow down progress. And if you want your employees to feel like they’re all leaders of your team, you need to make sure they’re helping you make progress. Or else they might start thinking you’re just making empty promises.

Example of the Democratic Leadership Style in Action: Judy Vredenburgh

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Judy Vredenburgh is a democratic-style leader and President and CEO of Girls Inc., a nonprofit that inspires young women to be their best selves. Because this NGO relies on its board of directors, volunteers, and members to achieve its mission, it’s critical that she carries out her responsibilities in a way that is fair, equitable, and proves that the organization’s leadership and staff are good stewards of the donated resources that Girls Inc. receives.

3. Transformational Management Style

Transformational managers’ are innovators. They usually believe change and growth is the only way to stay ahead of the curve, so they push their employees past their comfort zone, making them realize they’re more capable than they originally thought. This motivates employees to keep raising the bar, leading to improved team performance.

Employees led by transformational managers are usually more dedicated and happy — their managers constantly challenge them and motivate them with the idea that they can reach their potential if they just keep pushing themselves. These managers are also right by their employees’ side, doing whatever they can to help them get better and succeed.

These teams are innovative, so they can adapt to drastic industry changes. But they can also risk moving too fast and spreading themselves thin. Constantly challenging the status quo is crucial for innovation and staying ahead of the curve, but, as a manager of people, it’s important to know how far you can push each of your employees before they start burning out.

Example of the Transformational Leadership Style in Action: Brian Halligan & Dharmesh Shah

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You know HubSpot as the powerhouse CRM tool that supports marketing, sales, service, and ops teams in scaling and enterprise businesses, but the company wasn’t always this way. In 2006, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah identified an issue with the way companies were generating leads. Outbound marketing simply wasn’t creating remarkable customer experiences.

Rather than finding a new way to bombard people with advertisements, the two created a platform that would bring customers to the companies that had solutions to their problems. Thus, “inbound marketing” became a corporate war room name, thanks to Halligan’s and Shah’s transformational leadership approach.

4. Coaching Management Style

Just like a sports coach, a coaching manager strives to improve their employees’ long-term professional development. They have a passion for teaching and watching their employees grow. And they’re more patient with short-term failure, as long as the team learns and improves as a result.

Coaching managers motivate their employees with professional development opportunities, like a promotion or more responsibility — these rewards make employees hungry for knowledge, and their steady development improves the team’s performance.

By constantly teaching their employees new things and offering career opportunities, coaches can build strong bonds with their employees. But doing this could also create a cutthroat environment that’s toxic for their team’s relations.

Leaders with a coaching style have two main focuses: overseeing employees’ individual development and bringing your team together. The best teams are the most united teams, and an employee experiences the most professional growth when both their coach and teammates invest in their development.

Example of the Coaching Leadership Style in Action: Bozoma Saint John

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When it comes to trailblazing a path for women of color to become leaders in the workplace, Bozoma Saint John truly shows up. As Netflix’s current CMO, she leverages her position as a tech executive to coach other women on their path toward professional success. Through authentic storytelling, Bozoma reaches her team and the greater tech industry with her visible and motivating leadership style.

1. Autocratic Management Style

Autocratic management is the most top-down approach to management — employees at the top of the hierarchy hold all the power, making decisions without collaborating or informing their subordinates. After the leader delegates action items, they expect immediate acceptance and execution from their subordinates, with no questions asked.

If one of their employees doesn’t follow orders, they’ll punish them by chewing them out or threatening their job. They’ll even publically humiliate them in front of their peers if they really want to make a statement to their team. Fear, guilt, and shame are an autocratic manager’s main weapons of motivation.

Autocratic managers are also the ultimate micromanagers — they police their employees every move to make sure they’re obedient, allowing little to no flexibility at work. Employees do what they’re told, and managers don’t want to hear their feedback. They see their conduct as a means to end for great financial success.

Teams and companies led by autocratic managers don’t usually reach great financial success because they can’t innovate. The same few minds call the shots which leads to groupthink and a stagnant ideation process. If they won’t let their employees, who have many different perspectives than them, share their new and possibly breakthrough ideas, then they’ll only leverage the same strategies that they’ve always been comfortable with.

The autocratic management style allows managers to make decisions extremely fast, but employees hate working under it. It’s also one of the most ineffective management styles: underdeveloped employees feel overwhelmed — they won’t get any help — and the most skilled employees can’t let their talents shine in such a rigid environment. Everyone’s professional growth is stunted.

Another problem with autocratic managers is that they don’t try to convince their employees to buy into their vision. Instead, they force them to do it. Even though coercion might work in the short-term, it won’t last in the long-term. No one likes to be controlled. And if people don’t know why they’re supporting the company’s vision, morale will plummet, leading to low-quality work and a high turnover rate.

The only time this management style is effective is when it’s temporary. For example, an organization might experience a crisis situation and needs to make important decisions — fast.

2. Servant Management Style

Servant managers put people first and tasks second. They prioritize their employees’ well-being over their team’s results, so they can foster a harmonious relationship with their employees and keep them as happy as possible. They do everything they can to support and encourage their team, and, in return, they expect their employees to be motivated to work hard.

But since servant managers don’t prioritize performance and avoid confronting their employees, even when they do a lackluster job, there’s no pressure to succeed. This can make employees complacent, leading to average or even sub-par work.

Servant managers also might spend too much time on team bonding rather than work, which could frustrate employees who are goal-oriented. They’ll feel like they can’t perform to their full potential because they have to spend a bunch of time doing trust falls.

3. Laissez-Faire Management Style

Laissez-faire managers monitor their team’s activities, but they’re completely hands-off — they expect their team to perform up to a certain level even though they don’t proactively help or check-in with their employees.

Employees led by laissez-faire managers hold all the decision-making authority, working on whatever they want with minimal to no intervention — which is a nice perk. They can also seek their manager’s guidance when they need help.

But most of the time, the team barely has any guidance or vision. Employees might feel pulled in every direction, so they can’t accomplish anything worthwhile. This is the least desirable and effective management style because, without any guidance or vision, most employees feel neglected.

4. Transactional Management Style

Transactional managers use incentives and rewards — like bonuses and stock options — to motivate their employees to carry out their commands. Their motto is “If you do this for me, I’ll do this for you.”

But psychological research tells us that extrinsic motivation, like financial rewards, wears off in the long-term and could even diminish your team’s intrinsic motivation to succeed at work.

After a while, rewarding intrinsically motivated employees with external incentives will trigger a self-perception loop. Employees will base their attitudes about their motivation at work off their behavior at work — making them think they were motivated to succeed because their manager rewarded them with some stock options and not because they had a passion for the team’s mission.

Intrinsic motivation is a stronger motivator than extrinsic motivation because the former is a better indicator for producing quality work, while the latter is a better indicator for producing a higher quantity of work.

Effective Management Styles for a Thriving Team

Management is one of the hardest jobs in the working world. There’s a reason why we’ve all had at least one terrible boss, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Now that you know the four leadership styles to adopt and which ones to avoid, you’ll be better equipped to lead your team through challenging and successful times.

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

With more than 2.8 billion monthly active users, Facebook is a major player in the world of social networking. Businesses looking to market using Facebook have one major tool at their disposal: the Facebook Page.

Facebook Pages were specifically engineered for businesses. They provide a public home on Facebook for your brand, allow you to publish content, and let you see comments and feedback from fans and customers.

Facebook Pages are a simple tool, but they offer countless interesting business opportunities. There are some companies out there who really take advantage of the cool stuff you can do on a Facebook business Page to connect, engage with, and delight fans, as well as drive traffic to specific parts of their website.

So, we combed through the web to find the top pages to inspire your Facebook marketing strategy. But first, we answer the quintessential question: What makes a good Facebook page?

What makes a good Facebook Page?

A good Facebook business Page accurately represents your brand, focuses on the customer, and answers for potential followers’ needs. The page should also entice potential followers to engage more meaningfully with your brand — whether by visiting your website, signing up for a free event, or joining your company’s Facebook Group.

In your Facebook page, you should have:

• A name that reflects your business in a professional and succinct way.
• An accurate page category that immediately tells users what you do.
• A description that establishes the benefits of following your Page.
• A profile picture that represents your brand and its colors.
• An engaging and descriptive cover photo that speaks to your customer’s core desire or pain point.
• A constant and steady stream of recently published posts that have links to other company assets and properties.

Not sure how to use Facebook for business? At a loss for how to be engaging on Facebook?

Check out our free Facebook marketing course to nail down the basics; then, check out the Pages below for inspiration.

Best Facebook Pages

1. L.L. Bean

Page Likes: 1.17M

L.L Bean is an outdoor equipment store whose Facebook Page effectively focuses on the customer and engages visitors beyond inviting them to like the posts. The content it posts is highly relevant for its target audience: cool photos, videos, and tips for outdoor adventures, each with a link and a hashtag. The Page also includes tabs dedicated to events, open job opportunities, and stores.

The description is especially notable, telling users the value they’d receive if they follow the Page:

“Welcome to the official Facebook page for L.L.Bean! Follow along for inspiring outdoor stories and photos, expert tips and advice, and a community devoted to helping make the most of every moment outside. #BeanOutsider”

2. Intrepid Travel

Page Likes: 601K

Travel agency Intrepid Travel has put together a great Facebook Page — complete with a special tab that shows trip and tour reviews, and one that lets users search and save trips without having to leave the Page. For instance, if you’ve been dreaming of a family holiday in Scotland, you can save it and come back to it later. This ensures users return to Intrepid Travel and its offerings every time they visit Facebook.

The brand also consistently posts compelling videos and testimonies that’ll have you itching to pack a bag and hit the road.

3. Shopify

Page Likes: 3.8M

Shopify is an ecommerce website platform whose Facebook Page features engaging multimedia. While the photos section consists of branded infographics that share data from the industry, the video section is full of how-to clips you’d normally see in article form.

The company’s case study series, “My First Sale,” is what really helps the Page shine. Check out just one of Shopify’s case studies from its Facebook Page below.

4. Salone Monet 

Page Likes: 1.2K

Salone Monet is a footwear brand that has tons of great images on its Page. Most notably, the cover photo features the types of shoes it sells, and even more, the image reflects the founder’s mission: To create “color-inclusive nude shoes to match you & all your favorite outfits.” It also includes a “Shop” tab where you can begin browsing the brand’s shoes.

All in all, Salone Monet does a great job of creating a fantastic brand experience that doesn’t require the user to leave Facebook. Plus, the Page has a widget above the “About” section that prompts visitors to ask them a question, increasing engagement right from the moment a visitor lands on the Page.

5. Essence

Page Likes: 2.9M

For a traditionally print magazine, Essence is almost all video now. But combined with its mesmerizing images and pop-culture-friendly articles, this publisher has turned its Facebook Page into the ultimate hub for hot takes on the latest entertainment industry news.

It doesn’t even matter what medium you consume Essence in now — it’s all just solid content to have on your news feed. And for as prolific and diverse as the publication is, its Facebook Business Page balances all of it quite nicely.

The company also broadcasts from Facebook Live every month. Check out its live video library below.

6. Dang Foods

Page Likes: 22.8K

The folks at Dang Foods have the unique challenge of having to find an infinite number of ways to feature a small collection of products so its social media content stays fresh and interesting. The key to its success? A wide variety of interesting visual content.

Much of its video and photographic content is centered around the ways its snacks are different from others in the industry. The products are Asian-inspired, and the brand is Asian-owned.

For instance, in the following post, it announces it’s one of the Asian-owned brands featured in a subscription snack box:

The one thing that its Facebook page is missing is more customer-centric content — but by centering its posts on company news, it can establish itself as a buzz-worthy newcomer to the industry.

7. Zappos.com

Page Likes: 2.4M

Zappos.com is known for great customer service, and it keeps that reputation going on its Facebook Page. For example, it has a badge in the “About” section that says it’s “Very responsive” to customer messages. That’s a great honor — especially considering the fact that it has nearly 2.4 million followers. That’s a lot of people the company could potentially need to respond to.

The Page also has a small section dedicated to visitor posts, which features customer testimonials about Zappos’ great customer service on and off Facebook. Not to mention, the brand is committed to responding to comments — and it isn’t afraid to have fun with the responses:

Customer service aside, Zappos has also fully taken advantage of Facebook’s call-to-action button feature by placing a “Shop Now” button at the top of its Facebook Page.

8. McBride Sisters

Page Likes: 32.6K

McBride Sisters is a wine and spirits brand that immediately greets users with its Black Girl Magic line of wines in the cover photo. In doing so, it immediately appeals to its customers and exhibits its commitment to representing excluded voices in the industry.

While it mostly shares company news as opposed to customer-centric tips, it strikes the right balance by only sharing what its customer base cares about. For instance, in the following post, the company shares an upcoming event. If you’re a fan of Patti LaBelle and a lover of wine, you’d be compelled to attend — even if you don’t yet plan to buy a bottle of wine from McBride Sisters.

9. JetRockets

Page Likes: 119

First things first: JetRockets, a small web development agency, has an illustrated cover photo that is so fun to look at. As a result, the company gives visitors an early glimpse into its versatility and attention to detail.

As you can see from the image above, the company also features a call-to-action (CTA) button below the cover photo that tells users to “Call Now.” Right away, the button invites visitors to engage with the brand. With how quickly you must act to get customers’ business, this is a valuable feature of JetRocket’s business Page.

While the Facebook Page’s photo section is rich with employee photos showing off the company’s culture, its feed is filled with a mixture of company news and testimonies that prove the effectiveness of its services and offerings.

10. Glamnetic

Page Likes: 67K

Glamnetic rocks Facebook. Its Page prioritizes the things it knows users care about most when visiting Facebook: tutorials, live streams, discounts, and giveaways. At every turn, it gives users the chance to get Glamnetic products for free.

Not only that, it’s constantly putting out relatable and compelling visual content that gets high levels of engagement from its fans. For example, it partners with a wide collection of influencers who represent its customer base, and it also presents its new products in time for the upcoming season.

11. BET

Page Likes: 7.5M

BET, a news and entertainment company, leans on social media sites like Facebook to share its newest articles.

It does a great job of keeping its Facebook content fresh and up-to-date, which is especially important for a broadcasting company. Not to mention, each article it posts gains a ton of traffic as a result of its Facebook marketing strategy.

The folks that run the Facebook Page always find clever ways to keep the BET family connected and engaged using hashtags like #BETBuzz:

12. Helen Keller International

Page Likes: 17K

Helen Keller International is a charity organization that’s committed to decreasing poverty and preventing vision loss. It does a fantastic job engaging its volunteer and donor bases on Facebook. It right away invites donations by including a “Donate” button right underneath its cover photo, and its posts and photos feature the personal stories of patients who were helped thanks to the generosity of people like its Facebook Fans.

Its Page also offers tabs that allow you to create a fundraiser, browse careers, look at photos, and more.

13. Starbucks

Page Likes: 36.5M

Starbucks was an early social media adopter, and it comes through in the polish and features of its Facebook Page. The “International” tab leads you to its local Facebook Pages, so non-English-speaking fans can easily navigate to their country’s Starbucks Page.

Beyond that, Starbucks uses its Page to showcase rich visual content, run contests for seasonal products, highlight job openings, and interact with followers. It takes a fairly minimalist approach and uses short captions, like it does in the post below:

It also offers a slick store locator that allows you to find the location nearest to you.

14. Hint

Page Likes: 3.2K Likes

Hint is a Mexico-based marketing agency with a simple but effective Facebook business Page. Part of this impression comes from the company’s consistent and on-brand posts. It immediately invites users to message the brand via WhatsApp, one of the biggest messaging platforms in Latin America.

One of this Page’s premiere features, shown below, is its “Services” section, offering branded tiles that briefly describe Hint’s lines of business. From the unique and location-specific call-to-action to the warm color scheme, this business Page effectively engages users.

15. Adobe

Page Likes: 1.3M

Adobe is a computer software company that could post all about software and technology all the time … but it does a great job of catering its content to Facebook users, who tend to log on to socialize, read or watch fun content, or read the news. 

Its posts strike the right balance between conversational and authoritative. For instance, in one of its posts, it uses fun emojis while inviting users to celebrate World Emoji Day with an interdisciplinary artist:

16. Canva

Page Likes: 1.6M

Your customers can be your best sources for market research. The Canva Facebook Page places its Review tab at the forefront, whereas most Pages place the “About” or “Photos” tabs in the same spot. Customers have the option to post their unfiltered thoughts, recommend Canva, and share their opinion on their own Facebook Pages.

It also has a running series called “Design Stories,” where it shares touching anecdotes. 

17. EasyLunchboxes

Page Likes: 272K

With all that space in the cover photo, why not pair colorful visuals with a strong value statement? That’s exactly what EasyLunchboxes does. It puts it all out there as soon as a user lands on its Facebook Page.

In addition to posting fun pictures, videos, and tips like “lunch box hacks,” the Page also includes tabs that let users ask questions, sign up for the newsletter, follow the brand’s blog, and even get recipe and meal ideas. Overall, the Page is on-brand and clearly displays the utility of the product.

18. Pure Barre

Page Likes: 334K

For a company that’s been around for over 20 years, Pure Barre has shown that it can keep up with the times on its Facebook Page. Its posts include a mixture of testimonies, challenges, and reposts from current Pure Barre customers. Overall, it keeps engagement high by posting lots of content, much of which features members’ inspirational fitness journeys.

It also has a handy “Store” locator app within the page so that prospective members can easily see whether there’s a location nearby. To ensure that users engage as quickly a possible with the brand, it includes a “Sign Up” button right below the cover photo.

Pure Barre also knows its target customer base quite well. For many, seeing people’s progress is key to making a fitness investment, so the Page includes reviews right next to the Home tab.

19. Stella & Dot

Page Likes: 530K

As a company based on creating flexible entrepreneurial opportunities for women, Stella & Dot relies on platforms like Facebook to help grow its business via word-of-mouth marketing. It’s a great example of an organization that’s successfully built a community on Facebook.

Stella & Dot uses its Page to share styling tips with its social community, show how its pieces are designed and made, and post videos on how to wear its jewelry. All of its visual content is vibrantly colored and beautifully shot.

It has also taken advantage of Facebook Live by posting live videos of trunk shows, which can help prospective trunk show hosts learn how to do one — or just bring entertainment to anyone watching.

(Read this article for more awesome Facebook Live use cases.)

20. Mabel’s Labels

Page Likes: 215K

Like Zappos, Mabel’s Labels — creators of high-quality labels for the stuff kids lose — has also taken advantage of Facebook’s call-to-action (CTA) button feature with its “Shop Now” CTA, linking to its homepage.

In terms of content, it has mastered the art of posting the perfect balance of engaging videos, photos, and GIFs that align with the interests of its target audience: Moms who want their children to have a stress-free and positive childhood. For example, check out this photo it posted about the inclusivity of its products:

Mabel’s Labels has also taken advantage of Facebook Live and posted tons of videos that would be of interest to its audience. 

21. UNICEF

Page Likes: 12M

UNICEF’s Facebook Page is all about teaching Facebook users about its mission and giving them opportunities to get involved. For instance, they can click on the “Learn More” call-to-action button to visit the official website, or they can navigate to the “Guides” tab to browse through the organization’s guides on humanitarian values.

UNICEF also lets you create a Fundraiser straight from the Facebook page. The organization is known for creating powerful content to spread awareness and positive messages about current events. During the pandemic, for example, it created a video series to help individuals navigate hardship.

22. Black Lives Matter

Page Likes: 744K

Black Lives Matter is an organization whose Facebook Page is founded on uplifting historically excluded voices. In the same way, you can create a Page that highlights external experts on industry topics.

The organization’s posts include a mixture of Black history, organizational news, and political activism. Its video tab includes videos that bring attention to American issues, such as voting and abolition. In doing so, it effectively appeals to its followers and target audience.

23. Innclusive

Page Likes: 17.5K

Innclusive, an Airbnb competitor, uses its Facebook page to bring awareness to an issue by including an attention-grabbing statistic in its description. “A few months ago,” the Page’s description says, “a study conducted by Harvard University found that Airbnb hosts are 16% less likely to book users with ‘distinctively African-American names.’” In doing so, the Page immediately shows why the company’s services are needed.

It also invites users to book with them using a simple but effective line: “Come stay with us!” Another successful aspect of this page is its CTA button under the cover photo inviting visitors to sign up on the Innclusive website.

24. Rebundle

Page Likes: 363

Rebundle is a plant-based hair extension company that effectively conveys its ecologically centered products in its cover image and profile picture. It also invites users to engage immediately by including a “View Shop” button, which takes you to a page with pictures of its products in use.

In its posts, the Page shares company news, videos from other users, and photos of its customers successfully using the hair extensions.

25. Rhymes with Reason

Page Likes: 860

Rhymes with Reason is an education-technology startup that uses hip-hop music to teach vocabulary to students. It effectively uses its Facebook Page to spotlight stories from current and upcoming customers, share the Word of the Week, and highlight the artists it features on the platform.

Rhymes with Reason’s Page is an excellent example of striking the right balance between serving your target customers and sharing company news. In all of its posts, it uses its brand colors and aesthetic; that way, visitors can expect a consistent experience every time the brand publishes a post.

In its Community section, the brand allows anyone and everyone to tag them in posts, encouraging conversation and engagement.

Best Facebook Page Names

Your Facebook Page name would ideally be your business name — no frills and no keywords cluttering up the name. It should also be highly unique. Keep it simple like in the examples below:

• Rebundle
• Innclusive
• Canva
• Adobe

These names work well because they directly reflect the brand and are simple to remember.

If you need name ideas for your business, check out more business name ideas to inspire you.

Let These Winning Facebook Pages Inspire You

Use these awesome Page examples as inspiration to finally create a Facebook Page for your business or as motivation to improve your existing Page. You don’t have to do everything. Instead, focus on the core needs of your fans and customers, keep your messaging and imagery consistent, and watch your Facebook Page grow exponentially.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in March 2013 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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Manual data entry might be one of the most tedious and inefficient tasks in the corporate world. Not only does it put you to sleep, it also wastes precious time and resources, slashing your productivity to bits.

Fortunately, there’s technology that can automate these mind-numbing tasks, eliminating human error and letting you focus on the work that actually matters — workflow automation.

By leveraging self-operating processes that run manual tasks, workflow automation can help your business save time and money, diminish errors, and boost productivity.

How does workflow automation work?

Workflow automation typically relies on a series of if/then statements to trigger another task. It then branches off depending on the action that was taken by a lead, employee, or another stakeholder.

Let’s walk through an example workflow for turning a form submission into a deal opportunity.

• A website visitor submits a form.
• The action automatically enrolls the visitor in a drip campaign. It creates a new deal and sets the status to “New.”
• The first email of the drip campaign is sent to the lead, requesting to schedule a meeting.
• The lead clicks through to the meeting scheduler and creates an appointment.
• A thank you email is sent to the lead, confirming the date and time.
• The CRM creates a new task and assigns it to a sales rep.
• The sales rep then reaches out personally, ending the automated workflow.

Here’s what a workflow can look like from start to finish.

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Almost every department in your business can benefit from workflow automation. Whether it’s marketing, human resources, or finance, the technology can help you work smarter, not harder.

Below, we’ll cover some of the most popular workflow automation examples.

Workflow automation can be used in virtually any team and in any business scenario. While it’s mostly related to marketing and sales, it can also be used in customer service, operations, human resources, and finance.

Marketing Workflow Automation

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Some of the most repetitive tasks in marketing, such as sending emails and posting social media updates, can be automated with workflow automation. With marketing automation software, you can schedule your entire social media calendar and set up workflows that nurture certain types of prospects with email offers.

Automated workflows in marketing include:

• Subscribing a user to a drip campaign when they download a resource from your website
• Welcoming a user to your company after they purchase a product
• Reminding a user to check out after they’ve added various items to their cart
• Scheduling social media posts across multiple platforms
• Distributing marketing tasks across team members

Additional Reading

• Beginner’s Guide to Marketing Automation
• Marketing Automation Benefits
• B2C Marketing Automation
• Email Marketing Workflows

Sales Workflow Automation

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Sales workflow automation streamlines tedious lead and prospect management tasks, so that reps can focus on selling, not entering data. Aside from taking leads automatically through the pipeline based on their actions, an automated sales workflow can enroll prospects in drip campaigns and update deal stages as the deal moves forward.

Automated tasks in sales include:

• Placing each lead at a different stage of the pipeline when they take a certain action
• Moving a lead out of the pipeline if they’ve stopped responding to emails
• Sending an introduction email from a sales rep to a lead after they download an ebook
• Updating the deal stage once the lead has scheduled an appointment or meeting
• Creating tasks for sales reps once a lead has scheduled a meeting

Additional Reading

• Beginner’s Guide to Sales Automation
• Sales Automation Stats
• Sales Force Automation
• CRM Automation

Customer Service Workflow Automation

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Workflow automation is incredibly useful in customer service. Aside from launching surveys, workflow automation can take care of tickets, cases, and common questions by sending a series of emails or creating tasks.

Automated tasks in customer service include:

• Creating a new ticket in the system when someone reaches out through social media or email
• Onboarding customers with a series of helpful emails
• Sending NPS® surveys and enrolling them into different email campaigns depending on their rating
• Assigning tickets a priority label depending on the tone of the message or email
• Resolving and archiving tickets once a resolution has been reached

Additional Reading

• Beginner’s Guide to Customer Service Automation
• Customer Relationship Automation
• Customer Service Software Tools
• AI Chatbots Tools

Operations Workflow Automation

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Operations is the lifeblood of any organization, and it, too, can be automated to reduce instances of manual data entry.

Automated tasks in operations include:

• Deleting duplicates once they have been detected or merging two properties if they’re the same
• Managing team permissions for new team members
• Establishing priorities for different businesses processes
• Automatically compiling reports at the end of every quarter
• Creating tasks in third-party tools such as Asana, Slack, or Zoom

Additional Reading

• Guide to Business Process Automation
• Ultimate Guide to Operations Hub

Human Resources Workflow Automation

Instead of having to manually enter all your new hires’ personal information — like addresses, social security numbers, and other employee information into payroll, expense, and insurance systems — HR automation software can do it for you in minutes.

Automated tasks in human resources include:

• Removing candidates from the database if they’ve been inactive for a period of time
• Sending emails to candidates that haven’t made it to the final round
• Filtering candidates with certain keywords in their job history
• Sending W2s to current employees
• Collecting employees’ feedback after they’ve been at the company for a period of time

Finance Workflow Automation

By allowing you to build forms, design workflows, and track processes, finance process automation software can streamline all of your travel requests, reimbursements, and budget approvals.

Automated tasks in finance include:

• Taking an expense approval process from start to finish
• Managing vendor and contract approvals
• Assigning priorities to ACH and wire requests
• Managing travel expense requests depending on location and activity
• Approving budgets based on a predetermined set of parameters

Now that you know everything about using automated workflows, let’s take a look at the top tools you can use.

Best Workflow Automation Software in 2021

1. HubSpot: Best All-in-One Workflow Automation Software

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HubSpot’s marketing, sales, service, and operations software operates on a single platform, making it one of the best choices for all-in-one workflow automation. Everything is linked together, allowing you to align all of your teams’ processes and reducing friction from task to task.

You can easily hand leads from marketing to sales, connect a service ticket with an existing contact record, and clean up customer data — all in one user-friendly platform.

Best for: HubSpot is highly recommended for growing businesses that have yet to try workflow automation and for enterprise businesses with established processes. You can begin with a Starter subscription, then upgrade as you require more functionalities. Especially recommended for marketing, sales, service, and operations departments.

Pricing for Marketing Hub: Free; $50/month (Starter); $890/month (Professional); $3,200/month (Enterprise)

Pricing for Sales Hub: Free; $50/month (Starter); $500/month (Professional); $1,200/month (Enterprise)

Pricing for Service Hub: Free; $50/month (Starter); $400/month (Professional); $1,200/month (Enterprise)

Pricing for Operations Hub: Free; $50/month (Starter); $800/month (Professional)

2. Nintex: Best Enterprise Workflow Automation Software

With over 3 million workflow applications operating on their platform right now, Nintex helps more than 8,000 enterprise customers manage, automate, and optimize their business processes, with no coding experience required.

By offering a multitude of workflow automation tools — like process mapping, advanced workflows, and process intelligence — your business is able to map out each of your processes, execute them, and monitor their performance.

Best for: Nintex is highly recommended for enterprise businesses with established processes. It’s a robust software that pairs a user-friendly workflow design tool with powerful integrations that will connect every single one of your apps. Especially recommended for IT, law, HR, and finance departments.

Pricing: $910/month (Standard); $1,400/month (Enterprise)

3. Kissflow: Best Beginner-Friendly Workflow Automation Software

Trusted by over 10,000 companies, including Domino’s, Michelin, and Pepsi, Kissflow offers an all-in-one workflow automation software that lets your business create workflows that automate tasks in your human resources, sales, finance, administration, marketing, and purchase departments.

With over 50 pre-installed business process management apps — such as expensing and sales orders, conditions and triggers, and reporting dashboards for your workflows — Kissflow can streamline almost all your business processes.

Best for: Kissflow is highly recommended for small companies that are just now starting to try workflow automation. The tool’s simplicity and user friendliness will make it easier to begin automating processes. Especially recommended for procurement, HR, and finance departments.

Pricing: $200/month (Basic); $495/month (Advanced); $1,900/month (Fully Loaded)

4. Integrify: Best Everyday Administration Workflow Automation Software

Integrify is a workflow automation software that lets you build workflows in a drag-and-drop builder and run parallel or sequential flows. By being able to collaborate on tasks and requests, test your processes, and set up reminders, you can easily streamline your business processes and automate manual tasks.

Integrify also offers workflow examples and a user knowledge base, a rest-based open API that allows you to integrate with external databases, and the ability to import and export data from Excel and even PDFs.

Best for: Integrify is highly recommended for small-to-medium businesses that are looking to automate everyday tasks. Its drag-and-drop “Process Builder” makes it simple and easy to take a process from start to completion. Especially recommended for administration departments.

Pricing: Pricing available upon request

5. Zapier: Best Workflow Automation Software for Connecting Apps

With the ability to connect to and share data with over 1,000 web apps, like Facebook, QuickBooks, and Google Drive, Zapier can automate almost any type of business process. All you have to do is build a workflow in their editor, pick the apps you want to include in your workflow, and design it.

For example, if you want to be able to save all your attachments in Dropbox, you can design a workflow that automatically copies any attachment from your Gmail inbox to Dropbox and then sends you a Slack message about the download.

Best for: Zapier is highly recommended for freelancers and small-to-medium businesses that use a wide variety of tools that aren’t talking with each other. For instance, if you’re using MailChimp to send emails and Typeform to collect leads, you could connect those two tools using Zapier. Especially recommended for marketing and service departments.

Pricing: Free; $19.99/month (Starter); $49/month (Professional)

6. Flokzu: Best Project Management Workflow Automation Software

Without writing any code, Flokzu allows you to create tasks, deadlines, business rules, and notifications. Their software also sends pending tasks to each of your project’s assignees’ inboxes, and as each stage of a workflow is complete, it’ll automatically assign each new task to a user or role.

Additionally, Flozku offers a reporting dashboard that displays your business processes’

performance and metrics, like the amount of currently delayed tasks there are, tasks assigned to each user and role, tasks completed, and the time each task took, which will give you the necessary data to refine and optimize your future workflows.

Best for: Flokzu is highly recommended for individual teams that want to optimize their time management and task workflow. A key feature of this tool is that users will receive pending tasks in their inbox, making it an excellent project management tool. Recommended for any team.

Pricing: Free; $19.99/month (Starter); $49/month (Professional)

Workflow Automation Will Help You Grow Better

Workflow automation is critical for businesses that want to scale and grow without letting anything fall through the cracks. By letting technology complete manual tasks, you can effectively grow your business without any growing pains.

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

The word “guerrilla,” in its written form, seems very intense. It conjures images of rebellion and conflict. Put it next to the word “marketing,” and it makes a lot of people ask, “Huh?”

But guerrilla marketing isn’t some sort of combative form of communication. In fact, it’s actually a very unconventional form of marketing in that it raises brand awareness among large audiences without interrupting them.

The term itself was created in the early 1980s by the late business writer Jay Conrad Levinson, who wrote several books about guerrilla tactics in a number of professional areas. Of course, at that time, marketing in general looked very different, and while guerrilla marketing is still used today, the ever-growing digital landscape is changing what it looks like.

Roots of Warfare

When we hear the term “guerrilla marketing,” it’s hard not to think of guerrilla warfare — which makes sense, since that’s where this style of marketing got its name. In the warfare context, guerrilla tactics depend largely on the element of surprise. Think: “Ambushes, sabotage, raids,” according to Creative Guerrilla Marketing.

But how does that translate into the work we do every day? In marketing, guerrilla techniques mostly play on the element of surprise. It sets out to create highly unconventional campaigns that catch people unexpectedly in the course of their day-to-day routines.

Budget-Friendly

What marketers really enjoy about guerrilla marketing is its fairly low-cost nature. The real investment here is a creative, intellectual one — its implementation, however, doesn’t have to be expensive. Michael Brenner summarizes it nicely in his article on “guerrilla content,” where he frames this style of marketing in the same context as repurposing your existing content, like taking certain segments of a report, and expanding each one into a blog post. It’s an investment of time, but not money, per se.

In a way, guerrilla marketing works by repurposing your audience’s current environment. Evaluate it and figure out which segments of it can be repurposed to include your brand.

Types of Guerrilla Marketing

As niche as it might seem, there are actually a few sub-categories of guerrilla marketing, as outlined by the firm ALT TERRAIN:

• Outdoor Guerrilla Marketing. Adds something to preexisting urban environments, like putting something removable onto a statue, or putting temporary artwork on sidewalks and streets.

• Indoor Guerilla Marketing. Similar to outdoor guerrilla marketing, only it takes place in indoor locations like train stations, shops, and university campus buildings.

• Event Ambush Guerilla Marketing. Leveraging the audience of an in-progress event — like a concert or a sporting game — to promote a product or service in a noticeable way, usually without permission from the event sponsors.

• Experiential Guerilla Marketing. All of the above, but executed in a way that requires the public to interact with the brand.

We know — without context, the whole idea of guerrilla marketing can be a little confusing, so let’s see how it’s been executed by a few other brands.

Guerrilla Marketing Examples to Inspire Your Brand

1. Bounty’s Giant Popsicle

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By installing life-sized “messes” throughout the streets of New York — a giant, knocked-over coffee cup and a gigantic melting popsicle — Bounty found a unique way to advertise its product and the solution it provides, with minimal words.

You might ask, “Wouldn’t a concise billboard ad accomplish the same thing?” Well, not really. Culturally, we’re starting to opt for every possible way to eradicate ads from our lives. That’s why we love things like DVR and ad-free options on streaming services like Hulu and YouTube. This campaign, unlike an ad, isn’t as easy to ignore. After all, if you stumbled upon a melting popsicle the size of your mattress on your way to work, would you stop and look? We would.

The big takeaway: Identify the biggest problem that your product or service solves. Then, find an unconventional way to broadcast that to the public — preferably without words.

2. Deadpool’s Tinder Profile

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Some Tinder users were surprised to see none other than comic anti-hero and legend Deadpool showing up on their Tinder. With “cheeky” pics and witty profile copy, Deadpool broke the fourth wall and met potential movie-goers ahead of the movie’s Valentine’s Day release.

If the Tinder user “swiped right” and matched with the character, they received a link to purchase tickets.

While Tinder isn’t the best way to generate buzz — it’s limited in its reach to a small subset of users, and you’re technically not allowed to use the platform for promotion — screenshots of this gag quickly made it to social media, garnering a ton of attention.

The big takeaway: Promotions that use “interruptive” techniques aren’t frustrating if they create unexpected delight.

3. Childish Gambino’s Ice Cream Pop-Up

 

 

 

 

 

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Have you ever seen how powerful of a motivator free food can be? Make it a sweet treat, and you have yourself a winning combination.

Childish Gambino likely had this in mind for his “Summertime Starts Here” pop-up events where free ice cream was given away. As people queued up in the heat for some delicious ice cream, Gambino’s two singles played on a loud speaker.

It was a great way to expose listeners to his EP, Summer Pack.

The big takeaway: Sometimes you have to draw an audience in with incentives to earn attention.

4. The GRAMMYs Singing Posters

Okay, this one might not be entirely fair, since it wasn’t pulled off “in real life.” But how cool would it be if it was? To promote the nominees for its Album Of The Year category, the GRAMMYS music awards show created a video to show what would happen if posters for the nominated artists just began singing.

It might sound impossible to actually carry out something like that. But imagine — what if you could create musical posters for your brand? Again, it’s different than a billboard ad because, when we walk by a wall of paper advertisements in, say, New York City, we don’t expect them to start moving. Now, we’ll admit that this idea isn’t exactly a budget-friendly one, as it might require some technical work to bring to fruition. But even if you could include a single moving or digital image among a sea of still ones — in a place where it would come as a surprise, like a brick wall — it would catch people off guard and, therefore, get their attention.

The big takeaway: Think about the things that your audience might just pass by every day — and make those things do something that’s both unexpected and interactive.

5. Frontline’s Interactive Floor Ad

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When I first saw this photo, I’ll admit that I fell for it. “Someone, get that dog away from those flies!” I frantically thought. Then, I realized that the dog wasn’t real, and neither were the flies. The former was a photo, and the latter were actually humans.

That’s because Frontline, the makers of flea and tick prevention products for dogs, were able to fill the entire floor of this large, public space with this image. The brand knew that many people walk across that space every day, and that a good number of people would also see it from the building’s upper levels, creating the dog-and-insect illusion. It’s hard to miss — and to not look twice.

Again, this campaign is different than traditional marketing because it’s not just plastering a single message somewhere that’s likely to be ignored. It creates a form of accidental human interaction that reminds the viewer what the product does.

The big takeaway: Figure out how humans might involuntarily interact with your marketing messages. While your product or service may not address the issue of, say, insect removal, there are ways to make people part of the campaign.

6. Public Breakup on Burger King’s Instagram

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Breaking up is hard to do in person, let alone when it’s publicly played out online. That’s what happened — allegedly — when one Instagram user left a comment on one of Burger King’s Instagram posts sharing a tale of his “girl” procuring food from Burger King. There was just one problem. This guy does have a girlfriend, but she was nowhere near a Burger King. So, who was he referring to? The drama ensued, via Instagram comments:

After the comments began to make headlines, many speculated that the entire exchange may have been staged by Burger King. And if it was, we can’t help but salute them — what a way to get your brand into the zeitgeist.

Burger King has roughly one million followers on Instagram. And while we’re not sure how many followers the former had before this famous breakup, it makes sense to assume that this at least drew more attention to its social media presence, at least on this particular platform. People may have already been observing the brand on Instagram, but before now, were they actively discussing it?

The big takeaway: Guerrilla marketing has gone digital. Think about where your audience already exists digitally — then, give ’em a show. While we can’t condone lying, we can applaud creativity, so don’t be afraid to use the comments to get people talking.

7. UNICEF’s Dirty Water Vending Machines

I’m as guilty as anyone of wasting money on bottled water. I have no excuse. I have a reusable one. My workplace offers filtered water from a machine, not a traditional cooler, and yet, it remains a bad habit.

That’s why this guerrilla marketing campaign from relief organization UNICEF resonated with me. It posed the question, “What if those bottles of water you waste money on were filled with dirty water?” It was a way of reminding the privileged masses that in too many parts of the world, entire populations have no access to clean drinking water.

So instead of frivolously spending that money on bottled water, UNICEF suggested putting it toward efforts to bring clean drinking water to these areas. It did so by creating makeshift vending machines that sold bottled dirty water, with each button labeled as a disease caused by a lack of clean drinking water.

The big takeaway: Guerrilla marketing works in the not-for-profit sector, too. And while scary, saddening images are often an impactful way of communicating your mission, there’s a way to convey it by creating something less in-your-face and interactive for the public.

8. GoldToe’s Giant Briefs

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Are you an underwear company looking for an unconventional way to market your product? Why, just try placing an enormous pair of briefs on an iconic charging bull statue.

Really, we can’t make this stuff up.

It’s so simple, in theory, that it sounds like fiction. But when the GoldToe brand needed a way to tease and promote the launch of its new undergarments, that’s exactly what it did — casually placed these new items of clothing on statues throughout New York. And while we can’t be sure that it’s the route GoldToe took, we sincerely hope that those bull-sized briefs were made with leftover manufacturing fabric, helping to make this campaign even budget-friendlier.

The big takeaway: Don’t overthink it. Sometimes what looks like your silliest idea might be the best one.

9. Fiji Water’s #FijiGirl

How is this real? #FijiGirl #GoldenGlobes pic.twitter.com/Fko3XMmupa

— Daniel Howat (@howatdk)
January 7, 2019

Strategic product placement is one guerilla marketing tactic to gain attention in subtle ways. One such example includes Fiji Water’s presence at the 2019 Golden Globes where models wore blue and carried trays of water for thirsty attendees.

It didn’t end there, though. One model — Kelleth Cuthbert — positioned herself in the background during photoshoots, effectively photo-bombing high-profile celebrities.

When the photos started appearing on social media, people began noticing Cuthbert as a common denominator, dubbing her #FijiGirl. Ultimately, she became one of the highlights of the evening, winning over fans and drawing attention to Fiji Water’s brand.

The big takeaway: Your brand doesn’t need to be the focus of an event for it to stand out.

10. Greene King’s Candid Videos

When pub and brewing company Greene King feared that small, neighborhood establishments — notably, the pub — would start to be overtaken by large corporate retail, it launched a campaign to communicate just how important these local businesses really are. Even better, the content was almost entirely created by those who understand this predicament best: Pub owners, bartenders, and patrons.

These individuals were given cameras to capture video of the most meaningful moments and gatherings they’ve experienced inside these local pubs — from weddings, to funeral receptions, to birthdays. These videos were shared on Greene King’s YouTube profile and posed the question, “Without these neighborhood meeting places, where would we share these moments?”

The big takeaway: It’s okay to get a little sentimental with guerilla marketing. Think about the emotions invoked by what you offer. Then, invite your audience to create content around what your brand means to them.

11. BBC’s Dracula Billboard

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When I think of Count Dracula, I conjure the penultimate villain synonymous with everything that goes bump in the night. The BBC wanted to capitalize on this feeling to promote their show, Dracula.

By day, their billboard was designed to be minimalistic with red text on a white background with a few bloody stakes. However, like its subject, the billboard changed completely every time night fell.

The stakes were actually strategically placed — to cast a shadow of Dracula himself.

The installation ended up being featured in Adweek and had some viral success for its creativity and skillful implementation.

The big takeaway: Think outside the box for your advertising materials. In this case, light and shadow were enough to convey the message and capture attention.

Guerrillas in the Wild

Starting to make a little more sense?

Hopefully, you’ll be inspired by these examples, especially if you’re promoting a smaller brand. Don’t be afraid to crowdsource the content for these campaigns, for example — after all, it’s creative approaches to your work that help maintain guerrilla marketing’s budget-friendly, inbound nature. Remember: Catch people where they are, and insert your brand there. Don’t interrupt, but invite them to participate.

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

Now more than ever, businesses are focusing on creating delightful mobile website experiences.

Google has been heavily favoring mobile-friendly websites since 2015 when it updated its ranking algorithm, then started indexing mobile sites in March 2018, and has conducted mobile-first indexing since 2019. This is crucial, as there have been more search queries on mobile devices than on desktop for several years now.

Going forward, Google will only continue to raise the bar for what it considers to be mobile-friendly (including page load time) in its algorithm updates. So, if you haven’t been focusing on improving your mobile experience, you should start now or see your search ranking fall off.

To help inspire any mobile website design changes you’ll be making, here’s a list of 21 companies who really nailed their mobile web experience.

1. Shutterfly

Why it works: Shutterfly’s mobile website is easily navigable, highly visual, and intuitive for new visitors and experienced customers.

Shutterfly is an online service that allows users to create photo books, personalized cards, stationery, and other similar products. Because more and more people are taking photos and then accessing them using their smartphones, Shutterfly recognized the need to create a great mobile experience for their customers.

Shutterfly accomplishes two key goals on their mobile website. First, it’s easy for users to find out information about their offerings. Second, this information is complemented by beautiful imagery.

When you arrive on the mobile site, you’ll see Shutterfly’s latest promotion front and center as well as a finger-sized top navigation menu, neither of which overpower the user experience.

Scroll down and you’ll see large buttons that make it easy for users to quickly select which type of product they’re interested in. Once users click through to one of those options, they’re greeted with large photos showcasing what Shutterfly is capable of for easy browsing.

2. Google Maps

Why it works: The mobile website for Google Maps brings the same functionality, visuals, and performance as its mobile app counterpart.

Everyone has their favorite map or directions application. Mine is Google Maps, which I use whether I’m walking, driving, biking, or taking public transportation. What’s special about its mobile website is that it’s virtually indistinguishable from their downloadable mobile app.

These screenshots below are taken of their mobile website, but if you’re familiar at all with the app, you’ll notice they look exactly the same. Not only is the appearance identical, but the mobile website has the speed and functionality of the app.

3. Typeform

Why it works: Type form simplifies their mobile website to improve load times and deliver a simpler user experience.

Typeform is a Barcelona-based tech company with one simple mission: to “make forms awesome.” Their desktop website is beautifully designed, greeting visitors with succinct copy, relevant animations, and other complex design components.

But for mobile users, Typeform recognized that this complex design could significantly affect page load time, among other difficulties. That’s why they actually removed many of them, decluttering the site and simplifying the overall mobile experience. The mobile site is a simpler version of the desktop website, and it’s still beautifully designed.

Take note of the large buttons on their menu page — perfect for tapping with your finger on a mobile screen.

4. Etsy

Why it works: This mobile site pushes its most important features — site search, item categories, and trending products — on the homepage while avoiding clutter.

Etsy is an ecommerce website where people can buy and sell vintage or handmade items. Most buyers who visit Etsy’s website are there to do one of two things: Either they’re searching for a specific item, or they’re browsing items in categories that interest them.

The mobile website caters to both types of visitors from the very beginning. When you first go to their mobile website, you’re greeted with an option to search for specific items, shops, or categories.

Immediately below are thumbnail images of trending items that showcase some of the most popular things you can buy on Etsy. Mobile users can view these trending items in a collage format, and the images are large enough to easily tap with a finger.

5. Adrian Zumbrunnen

Why it works: Adrian Zumbrunnen takes a unique approach to the personal website, creating an experience that is entirely tailored for mobile users.

This is the personal website of Adrian Zumbrunnen, a UX designer, writer, and speaker. When you visit his website, you’ll notice right away there’s something very unique about it: It’s a conversational website.

It almost looks like a text message conversation you’d normally have on your phone, including the ellipsis to show he’s “typing.” Users are given two response options at the end of every exchange, so it’s akin to a “choose-your-own-adventure” experience.

While the mobile and desktop experiences are similar, the desktop website feels like it was made primarily for mobile — which could be the direction sites will go in the future.

And if you’d prefer not to engage in the conversation-like exchange, you can simply scroll down for details.

6. Elf on the Shelf

Why it works: The Elf on the Shelf mobile site makes its wide selection of products visible from the get-go and uses emotional, highly visual product displays to win visitors over.

Elf on the Shelf is, relatively speaking, a fairly new Christmas tradition based on a children’s book. If you’re unfamiliar, the basic premise is this: The book tells the story of Santa’s scout elves, who are sent by Santa to watch over children in their homes all over the world and report back to Santa.

Parents can purchase an elf figurine, which they’ll subtly place somewhere in their house where their kids can see it. Every night leading up to Christmas, parents move the elf to a different location around their house to “prove” that the scout elves are real and always looking over them.

When you arrive on Elf on the Shelf’s website, you’ll see there are actually numerous products you can purchase. But instead of forcing users to scroll through each product individually, the web designers package each product into a large, enticing tile describing the goal of each buyer’s journey, with the featured item displayed on the front.

You’re not buying your own elf or pup, you’re adopting it. It’s a truly empowering experience on such a small screen.

7. BuzzFeed

Why it works: BuzzFeed caters to its mobile users with a website that directs them to their topics of interest.

BuzzFeed is known for its viral content and popular quizzes. It also happens to be one of my favorite sources of entertainment during my commute to and from work.

And where do you think I’m checking BuzzFeed during my commute? You guessed it: my phone. BuzzFeed knows that a lot of their visitors are visiting their site on mobile, so they’ve taken great care to create a smooth experience for their on-the-go readers.

When you arrive at BuzzFeed’s mobile website, the first thing you’ll see is some of their most popular pieces of content displayed in a simple, collage-like format using large images that are easy to tap.

For users interested in specific categories, there’s a menu at the top of the screen that lists out all the post categories. Each category has its own directory page with clickable filters along the top.

8. Evernote

Why it works: With a clear conversion path and clean design carried over from desktop, Evernote’s mobile site makes clear what it does and how you can join.

Evernote is an application that allows you to store notes, images, and web articles and then access them across all your devices. Because users tend to download the app or access the website on multiple devices including desktop computers, smartphones, and tablets, it’s essential that Evernote gets the mobile experience right.

If you look at Evernote’s homepage on your desktop computer, you’ll notice how clean the design is. The value statements are short and to the point, and the graphics add to the brand’s positioning but don’t clutter the page.

When you look at Evernote’s mobile website, you can see they’ve kept their color palette and general brand style entirely intact. The company’s mobile website is clean, simple, and doesn’t detract at all from the value of the app. Evernote’s conversion path is obvious from the centered call-to-action: “Sign up for free.”

9. Pixelgrade

Why it works: Pixelgrade’s WordPress themes are mobile-friendly, minimal, and sleek. Specifically, the Pile theme is perfect for WordPress portfolio websites.

Pixelgrade’s Pile theme allows you to properly showcase your services and previous work and doesn’t sacrifice mobile design. The theme is optimized for mobile devices while delivering on your content’s intended message and aesthetic at the same time.

10. Huffington Post

Why it works: The well-known publication condenses its content to better fit mobile screen dimensions and serve readers on the move.

The Huffington Post is a news outlet that reports everything from politics and current events to entertainment and technology. What makes their mobile website unique is that they actually alter their headlines slightly for mobile users so their content is more easily scannable.

If you compare the desktop versus mobile websites, you’ll notice that the mobile website has fewer words on the homepage. The headlines are shorter and much more digestible — perfect for someone skimming or reading on a small screen.

There’s also a clickable menu in the top left-hand corner of the screen listing out all the post categories.

11. Express

Why it works: Express cleverly utilizes images to create a more realistic product viewing experience — users simply swipe to view products from different angles before committing to a purchase.

Express is a clothing store that caters to young men and women. Because their audience often comes to their website to browse clothing, it’s important for their website to include big, clear images of their clothing — especially on mobile devices, when users will need to tap items on the screen with their fingers to click through for purchase information.

Express takes its mobile experience a step further than most online retail sites. If you slide your finger from left to right across an image showing a piece of clothing, the image will change so you can see the clothing in a different view. In other words, users don’t have to load another page to see multiple pictures of the same article of clothing.

Look at the image on the top right in the following two images to see how it changes when you swipe to one side:

12. Nationwide Insurance

Why it works: This mobile site serves two different types of clientele and divides its mobile website accordingly. Whether you’re an individual or a customer, it’s clear where you should go.

Nationwide Insurance provides insurance and financial services. You might think a financial company would have a complicated website, but on mobile, Nationwide Insurance nails the simple user experience.

When you arrive on Nationwide’s mobile site, you’ll see two tabs at the top allowing you to identify as one of two types of users right away to customize your experience: Personal or Business. Or, alternatively, you can “Find an Agent” or “Find a financial advisor” to learn more information about their services.

Although limiting the experience to these two options excludes Nationwide’s more in-depth features, it makes for a much easier experience for visitors using small screens. This is a great technique to lead potential customers in the right direction if they’re not yet account-holders and are visiting the website for the first time.

13. Squaredot

Why it works: This mobile site nails the color palette, font choices, and interactive elements on the homepage. It’s simple, engaging, and playful.

Squaredot is an agency based in Dublin, Ireland that helps marketers build out their inbound marketing strategies. Their mobile website is colorful, simple, and makes for easy navigating.

What sticks out to me most is the visually pleasing color combinations as well as the large clickable menu that expands to reveal each of the organization’s services.

Farther down the page, there are entirely swipeable regions. The one pictured below presents client success stories and adds another dimension to the mobile site.

14. Zappos

Why it works: The Zappos mobile website is very easily searchable, which is critical given its huge inventory. The latest offerings are also clear on first page load.

Zappos is an online vendor for shoes and clothing known for its stellar customer service. Their top priority on mobile is to help users search easily for the items they’re looking for on their website, so they’ve put a large search bar at both the top and bottom of their mobile website to make it super easy for them.

This is what the top of their mobile site looks like:

15. ABC

Why it works: This mobile site’s dark theme is a contrast to many other popular mobile sites, bringing a theater-like feel to the experience. The highly navigable pages help viewers find their content of choice or simply browse.

ABC is a television broadcasting company known for popular shows like The Bachelorette, The Rookie, and General Hospital. Users visiting ABC’s desktop website are greeted with these options and more. View the network’s television schedule, check out the most recent Emmy winners, watch some of your favorite television shows, or even look at entertainment news relating to those shows.

But because nearly every household today is a multi-screen household, ABC knows its experience on a mobile device should be both simple and ready for viewing.

When you visit the ABC website on a mobile device, you’ll see a dark background for a theatre-like experience with tiles for each program you might want to stream. Users can scan through these options and click into any show they want based on genre, alphabetical order, what’s popular, and similar categories you’d also find on your TV’s streaming platform.

16. Lean Labs

Why it works: Lean Labs utilizes fly-in animations and distinct content sections to tell a story as users scroll down.

Lean Labs is a marketing agency that creates engaging, responsive, and high-conversion web solutions. (They were also featured on the hit TV series Shark Tank.) The folks there do a great job of providing a smooth experience for mobile users, especially with regard to their design techniques.

Notice how Lean Labs’ mobile website uses scale, contrast, and typeface to distinguish certain elements of their page. It even incorporates fly-in animations for its images to enhance the scrolling experience.

17. SAP

Why it works: Despite its plethora of offerings, SAP reigns it in on its mobile website and simplifies its CTAs and menus.

SAP is an enterprise software company that manages business operations and customer relations. The business enhances its mobile experience by condensing information and combining some of their calls-to-action into sliders, whereas their desktop website has these CTAs laid out horizontally.

This helps keep things simple so mobile users aren’t overwhelmed with a lot of information at once, and it also ensures none of the CTAs are too small to read.

18. KISSmetrics

Why it works: KISSmetrics uses color to separate content sections from each other and to create prominent CTAs that stick out, even on smaller mobile screens.

KISSmetrics provides analytics software for businesses. On their homepage, there’s a lot of information explaining what the software does along with a testimonial.

But their mobile site is displayed a little differently: On a mobile device, the information on their site is shown in a list with alternative dark and light modules. This makes it easy for users to skim the page without getting lost in text.

They’ve also made the text and fields on their forms large and easy to read:

19. idig Marketing

Why it works: idig prioritizes accessibility on its website, presenting a sticky accessibility menu where users can adjust various display options.

idig Marketing is a development and communications provider. Their mobile website is laid out similarly to their desktop website, but I especially liked the readily available accessibility options menu on the right side of the screen.

Tapping this blue icon reveals a menu where users can adjust settings like enhanced visuals.

20. IndiaMART

Why it works: This company’s mobile website is both conveniently browsable and searchable, depending on what visitors are looking to do on the site. It displays trending items prominently as well.

IndiaMART is the largest online B2B marketplace in India, and its simple category-based mobile store makes it one of the best mobile websites we’ve ever seen in the ecommerce industry.

The company’s mobile homepage puts the search bar right at the top so you can always retreat to a custom search if browsing no longer suffices to find the item you’re looking for.

But, IndiaMART makes it easy to peruse its digital aisles by sorting each item by item type, and then sub-types within each item type — a smart design move to encourage users to explore your site further. Under “Apparel & Garments,” for example, you have easily clickable tiles to check out more specific categories of clothing, such as menswear, women’s dresses, and even suits, sarees, and similar garb native to India.

Underneath IndiaMART’s browsing tiles, the company has its own trending section specifically for merchandise people are paying most attention to — similar to a trending list of news on a social media platform. Each trending category has a mobile-friendly call-to-action button allowing users to get price quotes for the product they’re interested in.

21. Pipsnacks

Why it works: Finally, the mobile website for Pipsnacks doesn’t sacrifice its visuals for smaller screens. Even on your smartphone, you’re immersed in the snack food company’s lighthearted branding.

To close out our list, Pipsnacks brings the vibrant colors and textures of their desktop site to the mobile screen. Products are listed as large, clickable images that bring you to their respective product pages, and the mobile site is enhanced with minimal but effective animations that add to the experiences without hurting load time.

Mobile Websites to Inspire Yours

These days, having an effective mobile website isn’t just a nice perk — it’s a necessity, at least if you want to rank in search results and get found. If you neglect your mobile site, that might just put off half your audience.

Fortunately, today’s website builders and platforms let anyone make a site that’s both desktop-ready and mobile-friendly. But, it’s the little details you add on top that will make yours truly exceptional.

Want more information on how to optimize your business with a creative mobile web design? Download the free kit on mobile marketing below.

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