Category Archives: B2B

Recently, our own David Fortino was lucky enough to be invited onto a number of podcasts to talk about NetLine’s 2021 State of B2B Content Consumption and Demand Report for Marketers. 

We’ll be breaking down a few of the most interesting takeaways from each episode so that you can get the most out of each conversation. The second podcast we’ve broken down is B2B Marketing & More, with digital OG Pam Didner.

Digging Deeper into NetLine’s 2021 Content Consumption Report

Considering that our platform is now supporting close to 14,000 pieces of content that are being promoted by B2B Marketers to their various audiences, have access to a ton of first-party data. As such, there’s a lot of insights to be mined from all of that information. But even though we have all this data, we’re big fans of letting the data do the talking without adding too much editorial commentary or a conjecture on top of the data.

And with that in mind, Pam stated the obvious: “I’m pretty sure B2B Marketers will be very interested to hear your insights.” We’d like to agree, Pam, so let’s take a look at what David and Pam discussed during their conversation last month.

Looking for Answers, Looking for Comfort 

It’s safe to say that, for the most part, B2B marketing isn’t ever involved in a life or death conversation (sorry to get so heavy on you). Sure, there are deadlines and pressing client requests that might raise our blood pressure a few points, but our industry doesn’t deal with earth-shattering stuff every day…until it did. 

Last year forced all of us to look at life very differently. Everything was (or at the very least felt) catastrophic, with professionals shaken at their core. They found themselves asking, “is my company going to exist through this?” “Are our customers going to persevere and actually be able to pay us?” “Am I still going to have a job?”

What David shared with Pam was that, while B2B professionals were facing all of this uncertainty, they kept turning to content to provide context and solutions to the issues they faced. “The most intriguing aspect there was that instead of perhaps as humans kind of sucking ourselves back into a shell and just hoping to get through this,” David said, “people actually leaned into content and said, “you know what? This is crazy and it’s scary, but I’m not going to sit still and wait for the world to dictate my outcomes. I’m going to go research; I’m going to level up my skills and I’m going to decide how to be best equipped with knowledge to get through this period.”

And lean in they did, as overall consumption increased more than 22% YOY, as people leaned into content to look for comfort and look for answers. “I think most marketing orgs were put on pause for a period where they were afraid to do much,” David said. “They didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know what to create. Yet your buyers said, “well, we still have a business to run and if you’re not going to create content that speaks to me, someone else is, and I’m going to be out there trying to educate myself to get through this period.”

So it’s a great learning lesson for Marketers that, you know, hopefully, we don’t have to go through something like this again. But if you’re facing some level of challenge and the industry perhaps is going through some, I don’t know, governmental regulation, don’t be silent, right. Be out there constantly leading your buyers versus waiting for them to, you know, find someone else to really educate them through that period of need.

Why First-Party Data is More Compelling Than Third-Party Data

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

About halfway through the episode, Pam asks David a big question. “So you specifically mentioned that first-party consumption is better than third-party consumption. Can you explain what that is?” While she didn’t use the word “Why” specifically, she didn’t necessarily need to; it was implied. 

We’re not shy about our love of first-party data. We don’t just think it’s superior to third-party data, we have the data to back it up. Given the opportunity, David seized it and shared his two cents. 

“The reason why we are of the mindset that first-party is far more compelling than third-party is the richness and the accuracy,” he said. “There’s no such thing as a persona when you’re talking about first-party data, you’re always talking about the person. It literally is Pam, David, Jane or Jim. It’s not Agnes who has two dogs and one cat and she loves an egg salad sandwich. Because [we know direct attributes about a person] there’s a tremendous amount of accuracy.”

Knowing exactly where a registrant works, their role, job level, job function, which industry they work in, and the company’s annualized revenues give businesses so much more to work off of. “The richness of that data is far better than what you can get on the third-party side of the marketplace,” David said. “The [adtech] industry doesn’t like saying this, but it is a form of guessing. You are modeling with high levels of internal confidence that those audiences show propensity to look and feel and act, and eat, and drink and have hobbies that are similar to these other audiences.” 

As David said this, Pam chimed in to highlight that oftentimes, when people register, they may not provide you the information you truly need. “How many times have you and I registered for something and we’ve given out a wrong phone number and no way to verify it [for the company].”

At this point, David talked a bit about NetLine’s technology and how it recognizes a little over 80% of registrants, which offers a seamless registration experience with zero typing. (But that’s a story you can listen to the podcast for…)

What COVID-19 Reinforced for Content Marketing

As we wrote about in our 2021 Content Consumption Report, we identified that the most successful content contained one of at least three core elements: security, predictability, and simplicity. One of the reasons these elements drove so much engagement is because of just how insane 2020 was and how little we all truly knew. But one of the other interesting pieces that David touched on after Pam’s question about the three elements was about how the element of security had a dual meaning. 

“Security took on two different meanings this past year: the first was, corporate security network security, cybersecurity; but then the second was real human security,” David said. “People were not feeling safe. And so what was wild was to see a flood of Marketers start creating content specifically weaving in COVID into it, into their topic, narrative, referencing how their solution is, is potentially going to alleviate concerns around that, workforce security, corporate security, and so on.

HR professionals were some of the most prolific consumers of content during the first few months of pandemic. While healthcare workers were tackling some of the most tenuous and stressful working conditions ever, HR pros were, in their own sense, battening down the hatches so they could weather the storm for their employees and clients alike. “It’s really logical when you look at it,” David said, “as most of the companies in the world didn’t have a distributed workforce and they didn’t have a real formal plan for all of their employees working remote.” In order to handle their new reality, they turned to content to help them.

“I think the pandemic somehow reinforced that [focusing on these three elements] is something that you should always do,” Pam said. “I think Marketers are trying to do that.”

Trying to keep everything together (what your audience needs vs. what the business wants to share with them) is a balancing act that Marketers have been trying to discover for years. The last 18 months may have finally helped to push everyone to the side of delivering value as directly as possible, as it showed us that the only way to have an audience is to make sure that we’re helping as much as possible.

Listen to the Episode

These three highlights are just a taste of what Pam and David dug into during their conversation. We really loved the questions that Pam asked David that would usually catch normal folks off guard…but since David lives and breathes everything NetLine, he was ready with information and answers regardless of how good Pam was…and Pam is good.

This is another must-listen podcast for anyone who is interested in how content can drive more meaningful outcomes via content.

Get comfortable and listen to episode 175 of B2B Marketing & More!

You need an email account — whether it’s for networking, job recruitment, downloading resources, transferring files, setting reminders, meeting with colleagues, or something else.

Even with the rise of office chat platforms, you still depend on email for a surprising number of things. But unfortunately, not every email service is completely free. And even the free ones might not be the easiest to use or have all the features you need.

It can be a challenge to find an email service provider at no cost that balances the right features with usability. To help make your search easier, we put together a list of the different types of email accounts you can set up, followed by the eleven best email service providers you can host your account on right now for free.

It can be challenging to find an email service provider at no cost that balances the right features with usability. To help make your search easier, we put together a list of the different types of email accounts you can set up, followed by the twelve best email service providers you can host your account on right now for free.

Types of Email Accounts

There are two main types of email service providers to choose from:

• Email clients, and
• Webmail

When you use your provider to access your email from a different device or location online, you can use one of three major email protocols to do so: POP3, IMAP, and Exchange.

Let’s briefly go over these different types of providers and protocols.

Email clients you’ve likely heard of include Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, and Apple Mail.

If you want to access this type of email from the web rather than the client’s computer application, the email client uses one of the email protocols described below.

For example, although you might have Outlook installed on your computer, you can also log in to your email account via outlook.com using a specific email protocol.

Webmail providers you’ve likely heard of include Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and AOL (all of which have made our list of best free email accounts below).

If you want to access your webmail from a mail app on your mobile device rather than your desktop web browser, your webmail provider can use one of the email protocols described below.

Before we get into the best free email accounts, let’s talk about those email protocols.

Email Protocols

Email protocols are the systems that actually retrieve your email for you. They can fetch email client accounts on the internet and webmail accounts on a mobile app. Here are the three main types of email protocol your account can use.

POP3

POP stands for “post office protocol” and is best suited for people with just one email account and email client. POP3 is the latest version of this email protocol and allows you to access email while offline. It, therefore, requires less internet bandwidth.

IMAP

IMAP stands for “internet mail access protocol.” And it’s one of the older email protocols available today. IMAP4 is considered the latest version, and unlike the POP protocol, you do not download your email to your offline email client. Instead, all your email stays online while you’re accessing and managing it.

IMAP is particularly useful for people who have more than one email account and access them from multiple devices or locations.

Exchange

Exchange is a Microsoft email protocol and is pretty similar to the IMAP protocol explained above. This protocol allows you to not only access your email over the internet from multiple devices, but also tasks, calendars, and contact information tethered to that email address.

For this reason, it’s beneficial to organizations whose employees share many types of information and collaborate remotely.

Now, take a look at seven of the best free email service providers (and 5 of the best email accounts for privacy) you can get your hands on today — both webmail and email clients included. For each email service provider, we highlighted a unique feature to help you find the best fit.

1. Gmail

Unique Feature: Native File Collaboration

Sign up here.

Type of email: Webmail

Who should use it: Anyone who already uses and loves the rest of Google’s products.

It might seem like an obvious top pick, but Gmail is just too versatile not to get our first slot. According to Litmus Labs, Gmail has the second-highest email provider market share (behind Apple iPhone’s native email app).

Ironically, one of the reasons Gmail has become so popular is because of all the communication options in your inbox that don’t involve email.

Gmail is a regular email inbox tool you can access once you have a Google account. Since it’s built into Google Suite, you can also access a group of free apps that allow you to chat, video conference, and share files with the people in your contact list.

Google Hangouts, available from your inbox’s left sidebar (or the right — you can customize how your inbox is displayed), lets you text and video chat with other Gmail users for the things that might not warrant an email message.

Like most other email accounts today, Gmail also has an intuitive calendar where you can set meetings and reminders.

Pro Tip: You can also use a free product like HubSpot Meetings to easily schedule meetings without back-and-forth emails.

Unlike other email accounts, you can use your Gmail address to log into and manage your YouTube account, as well as collaborate on shared documents and spreadsheets right from a cloud-based Google Drive.

Offering a generous 15 GB of free email storage, Gmail does everything it can to make your inbox less chaotic, including advanced filters that automatically push emails into separate folders as they arrive. And none of these functions costs a dime.

Pros:

• Allows you to un-send emails
• 15GB free email storage
• Accessible from any internet-connected device
• 99.9% protection from suspicious/spam emails
• Texts suggestions that help you write emails faster

2. AOL

Source

Unique Feature: Unlimited Storage

Sign up here.

Type of email: Webmail

Who should use it: Anyone who uses email for most of their communication.

America Online (I feel nostalgic just typing those words) has quietly kept up with today’s standards for a good user experience and is now once again one of the best free email accounts available to you.

Purchased by Verizon in 2015, AOL delivers your email from its classic news-driven homepage and comes with the contemporary spam filters and virus protection you’d expect from your email provider. You can also send text and instant messages from specific windows in your email inbox.

AOL does have something over Gmail, though: unlimited storage. Additionally, you can import email contacts from a CSV, TXT, or LDIF file, so you’re not creating your “buddy list” (get it?) from scratch.

Pros:

• Unlimited storage
• Highly customizable
• Offers a spellchecker to reduce errors

3. Outlook

Source

Unique Feature: Multiple App Integrations

Sign up here.

Type of email: Email client

Who should use it: Anyone who uses many different platforms to connect with others.

If you ever cringed at the sight of a “Hotmail.com” email address, you can thank Outlook for this outdated domain name.

But there’s good news: Microsoft has reinvented its longstanding email service, and your free Outlook.com email address has many advanced features waiting for you.

While it touts a calendar and message filter similar to Gmail, Outlook also integrates with several other popular communication apps.

For example, you can connect Skype, Facebook, PowerPoint, PayPal, and even task-management software such as Trello — making it very easy to reach and work with non-Outlook users without leaving your inbox.

Outlook offers 15 GB of free storage for each user, along with a super-clean interface.

Pros:

• Like with Excel or Word, you can use Add-ins with Outlook
• Easy access to other Microsoft apps like Skype
• Provides aliases that add anonymity to your email
• Excellent email organization
• Great search feature

4. Yahoo! Mail

Source

Unique Feature: Media and attachment history

Sign up here.

Type of email: Webmail

Who should use it: Creatives and anyone who sends and receives attachments frequently via email.

Yahoo! Mail, another well-known platform, sits just behind AOL in storage space with a whopping 1 TB (that’s a terabyte) for free, along with a few key social media integrations.

You can have custom background themes and search for key information from your inbox with Yahoo! Mail.

Yahoo! Mail makes it easy to find every photo, video, and document you’ve ever attached or received via email in their tabs on your inbox’s sidebar. This makes the platform especially appealing to those who share documents regularly or simply want an album made of every photo they’ve ever had shared.

Pros:

• Connects seamlessly with Yahoo Calendar
• Outstanding email organization
• Customizable themes
• Instant notifications for new emails
• Decent security to keep your account safe and secure

5. iCloud Mail

Source

Unique Feature: Label senders as VIPs

Sign up here.

Type of email: Webmail

Who should use it: people who use Mac and want everything on one system.

If you’re a Mac user, you may want to consider using iCloud Mail as your email provider. Their free email account comes with 5GB of storage that you can use to sync your photos, files, or email.

However, it’s important to note that storage is shared between all of your apps and devices — so if you take a lot of photos on your iPhone, you may eat into your email storage allowance for the month. Upgraded plans start at $0.99/month and go up to $9.99/month.

One of the most significant advantages of using iCloud over other email providers on this list is the ease of integration. Apple builds its desktop and iPhone mail apps with all email clients in mind, but it pays special attention to making the experience delightful for iCloud users.

Pros:

• Search functionality
• Ability to label senders as VIP to automatically filter important messages and save time
• One-click “Unsubscribe” feature
• 5GB free email storage

6. Mozilla Thunderbird

Source

Unique Feature: Customization features and the ability to open multiple emails in tabs

Sign up here.

Type of email: Email clients

Who should use it: Anyone looking for a simple but customizable email inbox.

Thunderbird, a free email application from Mozilla, known for Firefox, offers a quick email inbox setup and a simple, easy-to-use user interface.

The app offers customizable features, such as theme settings and app extensions to improve your email experience. The email app also allows you to open multiple emails in tabs, similar to how you would open various web pages in Firefox browsers.

Pros:

• It has a large extension library
• Integrates with Google Calendar to make task and meeting scheduling easier
• Smart email organization to reduce cluster

7. Yandex Mail

Source

Unique Feature: 10 GB of free cloud storage

Sign up here.

Type of email: Webmail

Who should use it: anyone seeking a free email with additional storage capabilities.

Yandex is a Russian web company that offers a global email tool. You can sign up for a free account with the tool, link it to your Facebook, Twitter, or Gmail accounts, and personalize your email inbox.

Like many of the other providers on this list, Yandex’s email inbox can be set to filter or prioritize emails so you see messages from real people. It can also recognize keywords in messages and subject lines and organize emails into categorized inboxes. Additionally, users who sign up for Yandex mail get 10 GB of free cloud storage.

Pros:

• Auto-reminder for un-replied mails
• In-built translator
• Read receipts on sent emails
• 10 GB free cloud storage

8. Zoho

Source

Unique Feature: 25 Business Addresses

Sign up here.

Type of email: Webmail

Who should use it: startups and small businesses.

This is the first of the free email accounts for privacy to make our list, but it holds a ton of potential for businesses.

The first thing you’ll notice about Zoho is its user-friendliness. From integrating with Google Drive, Box, and other cloud-based file managers, to its built-in task manager, this email service offers a simple way to accomplish all of your daily tasks.

The real difference-maker, though, is the ability to customize the domain name for up to 25 connected email addresses. Want to replace “@zoho.com” with the name of your business’s website? You can do so under Zoho Lite, which gives you 5 GB for free — all under [email protected].

Pros:

• Doesn’t scan your inbox for advertisement purposes
• Emails are in an encrypted format
• Notifies you if your messages don’t deliver
• Integrates easily with the Zoho CRM

9. ProtonMail

Source

Unique Feature: Encrypted email

Sign up here.

Type of email: Webmail

Who should use it: Anyone who sends and receives sensitive information.

ProtonMail offers just 500 MB of free space, but for the worthy trade of encrypted email, allowing you to send messages that nobody else can see and disappear after a month.

What’s the catch? Is the service hard to use? ProtonMail is easy to use on any device without any software needed to encrypt your emails, as with most webmail platforms. Its inbox interface is as easy to understand at a glance as the other email services on this list.

And the tool offers quick color-coded labels to help you further organize which emails deserve the most care and protection.

Pros:

• No personal information is required to open an account
• Compatible with other email providers
• Optimized inbox to boost productivity
• End-to-end data encryption

10. GMX Mail

Source

Unique Feature: Alias email addresses

Sign up here.

Type of email: Webmail

Who should use it: Anyone who needs multiple emails with one central inbox.

While you may not have heard of GMX Mail, it’s been around for quite a while (since 1997) — and it has a bunch of features that make it worth considering.

First off, GMX offers 65GB of storage. That’s a lot of storage for a free email service. In fact, they claim that it allows you to keep nearly half a million messages in your Inbox!

Another feature worth noting is the ability to send large attachments. While many services have low caps for your email attachments, GMX Mail allows you to send files up to 50MB. That’s great if you share a ton of photos, presentations, or other large files from your account.

But the feature of GMX Mail that really sets it apart is the ability to set up to 10 alias email addresses all from within one account. This can be useful in many situations — both personally and professionally.

On a personal note, you could use one alias for all of your online purchases and logins — to keep marketing emails separate from your private messages. From a business perspective, multiple email addresses can help manage role-based emails such as [email protected] or [email protected].

Pros:

• Spam filter to protect your inbox from suspicious messages
• Easy-to-use inbox management templates
• Mail collector for keeping all your emails (even from other service providers) in a single place

11. Trustifi

Source

Unique Feature: Data loss prevention

Sign up here.

Type of email: Webmail

Who should use it: Anyone who doesn’t want to choose between having a secure and functional inbox.

Trustifi combines the best of a productive and secure email provider in one place.

With available whitelisting and blacklisting options, you can easily choose who you allow to send you messages. Trustifi is also compliant with HIPAA/HITECH, PII, GDPR, FSA, FINRA, LGPD, CCPA, and more, so you don’t have to worry about losing your account overnight.

You can even use the Trustifi add-on to add an extra security layer to your Gmail or Outlook inbox.

Pros:

• Ransomware and fraud detection
• Ability to set expiry dates on sent emails
• Seamless integrations with other email systems or service providers
• End-to-end email encryption

12. Mailfence

Source

Unique Feature: Legal protection

Sign up here.

Type of email: Webmail

Who should use it: Anyone looking for a secure email account that integrates with other tools.

Mailfence is a secure browser-based email service provider based in Belgium. Given the laws in Belgium, all your data is locked away from any third-party access.

Their free plan gives you 500 MB of email space. But to truly enjoy the best of Mailfence, you’ll have to hop on a paid plan that starts at €2.50/month.

You’d be able to create up to 10 aliases on the paid plan and have 5GB of email space, among many other features.

With Mailfence, it easy to organize your day and business because you’d be able to easily integrate your email account with your contacts, calendar, and documents.

Pros:

• Quick integration with a suite of tools
• True OpenPGP end-to-end encryption

Making the Most of Your Email

And with that, you have some of the best options for free email accounts this year. But who knows? Your next email address could be entirely different while giving you just what you need to succeed.

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

I recently bought a new laptop. Before deciding which one was right for me, I read through a number of online reviews to ensure I was making an informed decision. Once I narrowed my search down to a couple of models, I visited the store to examine specs in person before committing.

To phrase the above scenario slightly differently, I was “pulled” into consider certain brands due to their laptop marketing. Then, I was “pushed” into selecting the right one for me by going to the store to read the marketing materials and see the laptops in person.

This is just one example of how push and pull marketing are at work both separately and together.

In this blog post. we’ll cover push marketing, pull marketing, push and pull marketing strategies, and examples of each.

What is push marketing?

Push marketing is a strategy focused on “pushing” products to a specific audience.

Also known as direct marketing, push marketing is a form of general advertising. When I grocery shop, I look for the signs that notate sales and gravitate towards them — picking up limes I never knew I needed. This is an example of push marketing.

Push Marketing Strategy

To understand a push marketing strategy, let’s consider Suzie.

Suzie’s marketing company is ready for its big debut. But the local businesses she’s trying to work with have no idea her company exists. This is a job for push marketing.

So, Suzie reaches out to businesses in her area via email marketing, puts ads in local shops, and creates a social media business page to expand her reach.

Because Suzie’s goal is to introduce her company to local businesses as she launches her new service, push marketing is an effective way to get the word out about what she does and what she offers.

For a business that’s been around for a while but still wants to execute a push strategy, another option is running a limited-time offer for your product. Use a channel your target market is closely tied to, such as a social media platform, or use landing pages to your advantage by including a CTA at the end.

What is pull marketing?

Now, let’s talk about pull marketing.

For instance, if someone is looking for a new babysitter, they might visit Care.com. They can select a babysitter based on a list of preferences that are specifically shown to fit their needs.

In the age of consumers educating themselves on products and services, pull marketing has become vital to markets with heavy saturation, like new apps or clothing companies. Pull marketing shows how you are unique as a brand.

Pull Marketing Strategy

To put this in the context of another business, let’s take a look at Luis.

When businesses are looking for a point-of-sale (POS) system, Luis wants his POS to be the one they choose.

Pull marketing channels are exactly what Luis needs to achieve this. To pull his target market, Luis starts a blog on his website, runs specialized and high-traffic social media campaigns, and focuses on differentiating his brand from his competitors.

To amp up his pull marketing strategy, Luis focuses on SEO for his online marketing to make his system discoverable to his target market. Google reviews, and word-of-mouth reviews on sites like Yelp are his best friends throughout his campaign.

Since Luis has already developed a following from his app’s debut, he can focus on credibility and reliability rather than marketing to make the next sale. After a while, this will pull customers to his business. Pull marketing strategies generally take longer than push marketing to drive results, but this strategy ensures long-term customers and growth.

Now you may be wondering about the best ways to ensure you’re selecting the right type of marketing for your business — to help with just that, lets more thoroughly compare the two strategies.

Is push or pull marketing more effective?

To decide which method best fits your business, think about how you want to approach consumers.

If you are trying to get the word out about your business, push will most likely be the way to go. If you’re a marketer building brand buzz in your market — perhaps about a specific product or service — pull would probably be best.

There are a few cons to push marketing — mainly splitting costs and keeping long-term customers. If your company is working with a supplier to implement a push marketing strategy, you’d have to split profits with the supplier at the end of the day, which means less revenue for you. Since push marketing focuses on short-term sales, building brand loyalty is difficult with an outbound strategy.

Meanwhile, a downside to pull marketing is that you might not cater to the right target audience. In order to connect to your consumers, you need to know who they are and what they’re looking for. For instance, an athlete shopping for running shoes might not be interested in advertisements for heels.

An effective way to make sure you’re covering all bases with your marketing strategy is by implementing a push and pull marketing strategy — you can marry the best parts of both strategies in a way that’s complementary to your business, audience, and goals.

Push and Pull Marketing Strategy

Push and pull marketing strategies can work together. Customers need a push for demand to be created and a pull to satisfy that demand. For those who haven’t heard of your company, a push is needed. For those a little further along in their buyer’s journey, you can pull them in.

The way you incorporate both strategies at your company will depend on your unique push and pull goals — to help you determine what your push and pull strategy will look like, lets review some examples of push marketing followed by examples of pull marketing. Then, you’ll have a stronger understanding of what your strategy will end up looking like.

Push Strategy Examples

1. Display Ads

Display ads appear in areas that are specifically dedicated to paid ads and may be formatted in a variety of ways, such as a banner ad. There are also display ads on social media platforms, such as Instagram, that you can create and share.

2. Billboards

Billboards are an effective way of building brand awareness and broadcasting your business, product, service, or campaign to as many people as possible. They’re strategically placed in high-traffic areas to get as many eyes on them (and hopefully, members of your target audience).

3. Direct Marketing

Direct marketing and direct advertising are also forms of push marketing — this can happen in a showroom, at a trade show, or in a brick-and-mortar store. It might also entail someone at a grocery store, like Trader Joes, offering free samples to shoppers.

Pull Strategy Examples

1. Social Media Marketing

Disregarding social media paid ads, as mentioned in the push strategy section above, there are a number of ways you can use social media marketing as a form of pull marketing. This includes how-to videos, influencer content (e.g. an influencer sharing a demo on how they use your product), beautiful images and videos of your product, and co-marketing campaigns on social media.

2. SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a strategy that allows you to get your content, web pages, and more in front of the people who are searching for relevant keywords, phrases, and terms.

When you optimize your web pages and other content for those search terms your target audience is actively looking for, your marketing materials and web pages will appear in front of them organically. This is a great way to naturally get in front of your target audience and buyer perosnas without feeling pushy while also increasing brand awareness.

3. Blogs

Blogging is an effective way of educating your target audience and providing them with the knowledge they need to make informed buying decisions, understand how to use and apply your product or service, or gain insight into changes in an industry, product updates, etc.

When you search engine optimize your blog content, it appears in front of your target audience organically on search engines like Google, automatically increasing the number of people who see and interact with your content as well as improving brand awareness and more.

Start Using Push and Pull Marketing

Start using push and pull marketing strategies to combine the power of outbound and inbound strategies and get the most out of your marketing efforts.

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

Nowadays, Instagram is often someone’s initial contact with a brand, and nearly half of its users
shop on the platform each week. If it’s the entryway for half of your potential sales, don’t you want your profile to look clean and inviting?

Taking the time to create an engaging Instagram feed aesthetic is one of the most effective ways to persuade someone to follow your business’s Instagram account or peruse your posts. You only have one chance to make a good first impression — so it’s critical that you put effort into your Instagram feed.

Finding the perfect place to start is tough — where do you find inspiration? What color scheme should you use? How do you organize your posts so they look like a unit?

We know you enjoy learning by example, so we’ve compiled the answers to all of these questions in a list of stunning Instagram themes. We hope these inspire your own feed’s transformation. But beware, these feeds are so desirable, you’ll have a hard time choosing just one.

Tools to Create Your Own Instagram Theme

Creating a theme on your own requires a keen eye for detail. When you’re editing several posts a week that follow the same theme, you’ll want to have a design tool handy to make that workflow easier. Pre-set filters, color palettes, and graphic elements are just a few of the features these tools use, but if you have a sophisticated theme to maintain, a few of these tools include advanced features like video editing and layout previews. Here are our top five favorite tools to use when editing photos for an Instagram theme.

1. VSCO

Creators look to VSCO when they want to achieve the most unique photo edits. This app is one of the top-ranked photo editing tools among photographers because it includes advanced editing features without needing to pull out all the stops in Photoshop. If you’re in a hurry and want to create an Instagram theme quickly, use one of the 200+ VSCO presets including name-brand designs by Kodak, Agfa, and Ilford. If you’ll be including video as part of your content lineup on Instagram, you can use the same presets from the images so every square of content blends seamlessly into the next no matter what format it’s in.

2. FaceTune2

FaceTune2 is a powerful photo editing app that can be downloaded on the App Store or Google Play. The free version of the app includes all the basic editing features like brightness, lighting, cropping, and filters. The pro version gives you more detailed control over retouching and background editing. For video snippets, use FaceTune Video to make detailed adjustments right from your mobile device — you’ll just need to download the app separately for that capability. If you’re starting to test whether an Instagram theme is right for your brand, FaceTune2 is an affordable tool worth trying.

3. Canva

You know Canva as a user-friendly and free option to create graphics, but it can be a powerful photo editing tool to curate your Instagram theme. For more abstract themes that mix imagery with graphic art, you can add shapes, textures, and text to your images. Using the photo editor, you can import your image and adjust the levels, add filters, and apply unique effects to give each piece of content a look that’s unique to your brand.

4. Adobe Illustrator

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Have you ever used Adobe Illustrator to create interesting overlays and tints for images? You can do the same thing to develop your Instagram theme. Traditionally, Adobe Illustrator is the go-to tool to create vectors and logos, but this software has some pretty handy features for creating photo filters and designs. Moreover, you can layout your artboards in an Instagram-style grid to see exactly how each image will appear in your feed.

5. Photoshop

Photoshop is the most well-known photo editing software, and it works especially well for creating Instagram themes. If you have the capacity to pull out all the stops and tweak every detail, Photoshop will get the job done. Not only are the editing, filter, and adjustment options virtually limitless, Photoshop is great for batch processing the same edits across several images in a matter of seconds. You’ll also optimize your workflow by using photoshop to edit the composition, alter the background, and remove any unwanted components of an image without switching to another editing software to add your filter. With Photoshop, you have complete control over your theme which means you won’t have to worry about your profile looking exactly like someone else’s.

1. Transition

If you aren’t set on one specific Instagram theme, consider the transition theme. With this aesthetic, you can experiment with merging colors every couple of images. For example, you could start with a black theme and include beige accents in every image. From there, gradually introduce the next color, in this case, blue. Eventually, you’ll find that your Instagram feed will seamlessly transition between the colors you choose which keeps things interesting without straying from a cohesive look and feel.

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2. Black and White

A polished black and white theme is a good choice to evoke a sense of sophistication. The lack of color draws you into the photo’s main subject and suggests a timeless element to your business. @Lisedesmet’s black and white feed, for instance, focuses the user’s gaze on the image’s subject, like the black sneakers or white balloon.

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3. Bright Colors

If your company’s brand is meant to imply playfulness or fun, there’s probably no better way than to create a feed full of bright colors. Bright colors are attention-grabbing and lighthearted, which could be ideal for attracting a younger audience. @Aww.sam’s feed, for instance, showcases someone who doesn’t take herself too seriously.

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4. Minimalist

For an artsier edge, consider taking a minimalist approach to your feed, like @emwng does. The images are inviting and slightly whimsical in their simplicity, and cultivate feelings of serenity and stability. The pup pics only add wholesomeness to this minimalist theme. Plus, minimalist feeds are less distracting by nature, so it can be easier to get a true sense of the brand from the feed alone, without clicking on individual posts.

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5. One Color

One of the easiest ways to pick a theme for your feed is to choose one color and stick to it — this can help steer your creative direction, and looks clean and cohesive from afar. It’s particularly appealing if you choose an aesthetically pleasing and calm color, like the soft pink used in the popular hashtag #blackwomeninpink.

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6. Two Colors

If you’re interested in creating a highly cohesive feed but don’t want to stick to the one-color theme, consider trying two. Two colors can help your feed look organized and clean — plus, if you choose branded colors, it can help you create cohesion between your other social media sites the website itself. I recommend choosing two contrasting colors for a punchy look like the one shown in @Dreaming_outloud’s profile.

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7. Pastels

Similar to the one-color idea, it might be useful to choose one color palette for your feed, like @creativekipi’s use of pastels. Pastels, in particular, often used for Easter eggs or cupcake decorations, appear childlike and cheerful. Plus, they’re captivating and unexpected.

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8. One Subject

As evident from @mustdoflorida’s feed (and username), it’s possible to focus your feed on one singular object or idea — like beach-related objects and activities in Florida. If you’re aiming to showcase your creativity or photography skills, it could be compelling to create a feed where each post follows one theme.

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9. Puzzle

Creating a puzzle out of your feed is complicated and takes some planning, but can reap big rewards in terms of uniqueness and engaging an audience. @Juniperoats’ posts, for instance, make the most sense when you look at it from the feed, rather than individual posts. It’s hard not to be both impressed and enthralled by the final result, and if you post puzzle piece pictures individually, you can evoke serious curiosity from your followers.

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10. Unique Angles

Displaying everyday items and activities from unexpected angles is sure to draw attention to your Instagram feed. Similar to the way lines create a theme, angles use direction to create interest. Taking an image of different subjects from similar angles can unite even the most uncommon photos into a consistent theme.

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11. Text Only

A picture is worth a thousand words, but how many pictures is a well-designed quote worth? Confident Woman Co. breaks the rules of Instagram that say images should have a face in them to get the best engagement. Not so with this Instagram theme.

The bright colors and highlighted text make this layout aesthetically pleasing both in the Instagram grid format and as a one-off post on the feed. Even within this strict text-only theme, there’s still room to break up the monotony with a type-treated font and textured background like the last image does in the middle row.

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12. Checkerboard

If you’re not a big fan of horizontal or vertical lines, you might try a checkerboard theme. Similar to horizontal lines, this theme allows you to alternate between content and images or colors as seen in @thefemalehustlers’ feed.

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13. Black or White Borders

While it is a bit jarring to have black or white borders outlining every image, it definitely sets your feed apart from everyone else’s. @Beautifulandyummy, for instance, uses black borders to draw attention to her images, and the finished feed looks both polished and sophisticated. This theme will likely be more successful if you’re aiming to sell fashion products or want to evoke an edgier feel for your brand.

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14. Same Filter

If you prefer uniformity, you’ll probably like this Instagram theme, which focuses on using the same filter (or set of filters) for every post. From close up, this doesn’t make much difference on your images, but from afar, it definitely makes the feed appear more cohesive. @marianna_hewitt, for example, is able to make her posts of hair, drinks, and fashion seem more refined and professional, simply by using the same filter for all her posts.

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15. Flatlays

If your primary goal with Instagram is to showcase your products, you might want a Flatlay theme. Flatlay is an effective way to tell a story simply by arranging objects in an image a certain way and makes it easier to direct viewers’ attention to a product. As seen in @thedailyedited’s feed, a flatlay theme looks fresh and modern.

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16. Vintage

If it aligns with your brand, vintage is a creative and striking aesthetic that looks both artsy and laid-back. And, while “vintage” might sound a little bit vague, it’s easy to conjure. Simply try a filter like Slumber or Aden (built into Instagram), or play around with a third-party editing tool to find a soft, hazy filter that makes your photos look like they were taken from an old polaroid camera.

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17. Repetition

In @girleatworld’s Instagram account, you can count on one thing to remain consistent throughout her feed: she’s always holding up food in her hand. This type of repetition looks clean and engaging, and as a follower, it means I always recognize one of her posts as I’m scrolling through my own feed. Consider how you might evoke similar repetition in your own posts to create a brand image all your own.

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18. Mix-and-match Horizontal and Vertical Borders

While this admittedly requires some planning, the resulting feed is incredibly eye-catching and unique. Simply use the Preview app and choose two different white borders, Vela and Sole, to alternate between horizontal and vertical borders. The resulting feed will look spaced out and clean.

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19. Quotes

If you’re a writer or content creator, you might consider creating an entire feed of quotes, like @thegoodquote feed, which showcases quotes on different mediums, ranging from paperback books to Tweets. Consider typing your quotes and changing up the color of the background, or handwriting your quotes and placing them near interesting objects like flowers or a coffee mug.

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20. Dark Colors

@JackHarding‘s nature photos are nothing short of spectacular, and he highlights their beauty by filtering with a dark overtone. To do this, consider desaturating your content and using filters with cooler colors, like greens and blues, rather than warm ones. The resulting feed looks clean, sleek, and professional.

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21. Rainbow

One way to introduce color into your feed? Try creating a rainbow by slowly progressing your posts through the colors of the rainbow, starting at red and ending at purple (and then, starting all over again). The resulting feed is stunning.

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22. Doodle

Most people on Instagram stick to photos and filters, so to stand out, you might consider adding drawings or cartoon doodles on top of (or replacing) regular photo posts. This is a good idea if you’re an artist or a web designer and want to draw attention to your artistic abilities — plus, it’s sure to get a smile from your followers, like these adorable doodles shown below by @josie.doodles.

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23. Content Elements

Similar elements in your photos can create an enticing Instagram theme. In this example by The Container Store Custom Closets, the theme uses shelves or clothes in each image to visually bring the feed together. Rather than each photo appearing as a separate room, they all combine to create a smooth layout that displays The Container Store’s products in a way that feels natural to the viewer.

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24. Structural Lines

Something about this Instagram feed feels different, doesn’t it? Aside from the content focusing on skyscrapers, the lines of the buildings in each image turn this layout into a unique theme. If your brand isn’t in the business of building skyscrapers, you can still implement a theme like this by looking for straight or curved lines in the photos your capture. The key to creating crisp lines from the subjects in your photos is to snap them in great lighting and find symmetry in the image wherever possible.

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25. Horizontal Lines

If your brand does well with aligning photography with content, you might consider organizing your posts in a thoughtful way — for instance, creating either horizontal or vertical lines, with your rows alternating between colors, text, or even subject distance. @mariahb.makeup employs this tactic, and her feed looks clean and intriguing as a result.

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How to Create an Instagram Theme

1. Choose a consistent color palette.

One major factor of any Instagram theme is consistency. For instance, you wouldn’t want to regularly change your theme from black-and-white to rainbow — this could confuse your followers and damage your brand image. Of course, a complete company rebrand might require you to shift your Instagram strategy, but for the most part, you want to stay consistent with the types of visual content you post on Instagram.

For this reason, you’ll need to choose a color palette to adhere to when creating an Instagram theme. Perhaps you choose to use brand colors. HubSpot’s Instagram, for instance, primarily uses blues, oranges, and teal, three colors prominently displayed on HubSpot’s website and products.

Alternatively, maybe you choose one of the themes listed above, such as black-and-white. Whatever the case, to create an Instagram theme, it’s critical you stick to a few colors throughout all of your content.

2. Use the same filter for each post, or edit each post similarly.

As noted above, consistency is a critical element in any Instagram theme, so you’ll want to find your favorite one or two filters and use them for each of your posts. You can use Instagram’s built-in filters, or try an editing app like VSCO or Snapseed. Alternatively, if you’re going for a minimalist look, you might skip filters entirely and simply use a few editing features, like contrast and exposure.

Whatever you choose, though, you’ll want to continue to edit each of your posts similarly to create a cohesive feed.

3. Use a visual feed planner to plan posts far in advance.

It’s vital that you plan your Instagram posts ahead of time for a few different reasons, including ensuring you post a good variety of content and that you post it during a good time of day.

Additionally, when creating an Instagram theme, you’ll need to plan posts in advance to figure out how they fit together — like puzzle pieces, your individual pieces of content need to reinforce your theme as a whole. To plan posts far in advance and visualize how they reinforce your theme, you’ll want to use a visual Instagram planner like Later or Planoly. Best of all, you can use these apps to preview your feed and ensure your theme is looking the way you want it to look before you press “Publish” on any of your posts.

4. Don’t lock yourself into a theme you can’t enjoy for the long haul.

In middle school, I often liked to change my “look” — one day I aimed for preppy, and the next I chose a more athletic look. Of course, as I got older, I began to understand what style I could stick with for the long haul and started shopping for clothes that fit my authentic style so I wasn’t constantly purchasing new clothes and getting sick of them a few weeks later.

Similarly, you don’t want to choose an Instagram theme you can’t live with for a long time. Your Instagram theme should be an accurate reflection of your brand, and if it isn’t, it probably won’t last. Just because rainbow colors sound interesting at the get-go doesn’t mean it’s a good fit for your company’s social media aesthetic as a whole.

When in doubt, choose a more simple theme that provides you the opportunity to get creative and experiment without straying too far off-theme.

How to Use an Instagram Theme on Your Profile

1. Choose what photos you want to post before choosing your theme.

When you start an Instagram theme, there are so many options to choose from. Filters, colors, styles, angles — the choices are endless. But it’s important to keep in mind that these things won’t make your theme stand out. The content is still the star of the show. If the images aren’t balanced on the feed, your theme will look like a photo dump that happens to have the same filter on it.

To curate the perfect Instagram theme, choose what photos you plan to post before choosing a theme. I highly recommend laying these photos out in a nine-square grid as well so you can see how the photos blend together.

2. Don’t forget the captions.

Sure, no one is going to see the captions of your Instagram photos when they’re looking at your theme in the grid-view, but they will see them when you post each photo individually. There will be times when an image you post may be of something abstract, like the corner of a building, an empty suitcase, or a pair of sunglasses. On their own, these things might not be so interesting, but a thoughtful caption that ties the image to your overall theme can help keep your followers engaged when they might otherwise check out and keep scrolling past your profile.

If you’re having a bit of writer’s block, check out these 201 Instagram captions for every type of post.

3. Switch up your theme with color blocks.

Earlier, we talked about choosing a theme that you can commit to for the long haul. But there’s an exception to that rule — color transitions. Some of the best themes aren’t based on a specific color at all. Rather than using the same color palette throughout the Instagram feed, you can have colors blend into one another with each photo. This way, you can include a larger variety of photos without limiting yourself to specific hues.

A Cohesive Instagram Theme At Your Fingertips

Instagram marketing is more than numbers. As the most visual social media platform today, what you post and how it looks directly affects engagement, followers, and how your brand shows up online. A cohesive Instagram theme can help your brand convey a value proposition, promote a product, or execute a campaign. Colors and filters make beautiful themes, but there are several additional ways to stop your followers mid-scroll with a fun, unified aesthetic.

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

What do the White House, Sports Illustrated, and my cousin Jimmy all have in common?

They all publish content on Medium.

For the White House, that content includes State of the Union addresses and policy announcements. Sports Illustrated, meanwhile, manages a sports news publication called The Cauldron. My cousin Jimmy? He publishes an ongoing series on advanced cat grooming techniques.

And that, my friends, is Medium in microcosm.

What is Medium?

Medium is a social publishing platform that is open to all and home to a diverse array of stories, ideas, and perspectives. Anyone can be an individual contributor, and popular topics on Medium range from mental health to social media, and from world affairs and trending news to productivity hacks. 

As Medium founder (and Blogger creator/Twitter co-founder) Ev Williams wrote when he first launched the platform in 2012:

“Medium is not about who you are or whom you know, but about what you have to say.”

To help emphasize the importance of what it is you’re saying, the overall design of Medium is minimalistic, featuring lots of white space and limited formatting options. Want to change the header typeface to Comic Sans? You can’t. Medium won’t allow for such atrocities of design.

But that’s just one of many little nuances that come with the territory for Medium users. In fact, if you’re just getting started on the platform, there’s a fair amount to learn before you hit publish. Let’s get into it …

Writing for Medium

Anyone who has a Medium account can write for Medium — there’s no other vetting process involved. To get started, simply sign up for a free Medium account (or upgrade to the full $5/month membership for unlimited access), and you’re ready to start writing from there.

However, your post needs to adhere to Medium’s content guidelines and rules. For instance, you can’t promote controversial or extreme content on your Medium account. You can’t facilitate buying or selling social media interactions, including off-platform. And you can’t publish anything considered affiliate marketing content. 

For the full list of rules in regards to content, take a look at this post on Medium Rules. 

As a marketer, Medium presents an opportunity for you to reach a new audience with your content. The platform is geared toward sharing longer-form, more well-thought-out content. (But of course, given the open-to-all nature of Medium, that isn’t the only type of content you find there.)

Whether you’re looking into Medium for its publishing capabilities or you simply want to learn more about the platform before you set up an account and start exploring, you’ve come to the right place.

How to Use Medium

Getting Started With Medium

1. Creating an Account

While it’s true that anyone can view Medium content (regardless of whether or not they have a Medium account), in order to publish and interact with folks on the platform, you need to have an account and be logged in.

Fortunately, you can create an account in less than a minute by going to Medium.com and clicking the “Get started” button in the center of the page (or the “Sign in / Sign up” link at the top of the page). From there you’ll have three different sign-up options to choose from: Google, Facebook, and email.

My recommendation: Sign up for Medium using Facebook. That way all of your existing connections from Facebook who are on Medium will automatically be following your account once it’s created. This saves you the trouble of having to build up a new audience entirely from scratch.

Regardless of the option you go with to start, you can always link your Twitter or Facebook to your Medium account later via the “Connections” tab in the Settings menu:

The Settings menu is also where you can update your username/profile page URL. If you sign up with Twitter, your profile page URL, by default, will be medium.com/@YourTwitterHandle. But you’re free to change it. From the Settings menu you can also control what email notifications you receive from Medium. (You’ll learn about what triggers these notifications in the sections to follow.)

The other main things to remember when it comes to setup? Adding a profile photo and writing up a short (160-character max) bio for your Medium profile page. (Note: If you sign up using Twitter, your Twitter profile photo and bio will be automatically synced to your Medium account.)

2. Following People, Publications, & Tags

With a Twitter feed, the content that’s surfaced comes primarily from the accounts of the people and organizations you follow.

With a Medium feed, the content that’s surfaced comes not only from the accounts of the people and organizations you follow, but also from the publications and tags you follow. What’s more, when you search for content on Medium, people, publications, and tags all show up in the results.

Medium publications are collections of stories based around a common theme. Anyone can create them — yourself included — and the way they work is fairly straightforward.

As the creator of a publication, you’re an editor by default, which means you have the ability to a) add writers to your publication, b) edit and publish the stories that are submitted by your writers, and c) review the metrics for all of the stories that are part of your publication. As the publication’s creator, you’ll also have the ability to appoint new editors (so they can do all of that stuff I just mentioned).

Now, on to tags.

Tags are sort of like the hashtags of the Medium ecosystem. When you publish a story on Medium, you get the option to add up to three tags, which appear at the bottom of your story. Clicking a tag brings you to a page where you can see more stories with the same tag, as well as some suggestions for other tags you might be interested in.

The main benefit of following tags is that it can help personalize your Medium experience. Instead of surfacing content based solely on your social graph (i.e., the people/publications you follow), Medium uses tags to surface content that’s based on your specific interests as well. For example, if you’re into baseball, you could follow the “baseball” tag. Into “small fluffy dog breeds”? Yep, there’s a tag for that (granted only one story has been published under it).

So far in this introduction to Medium, we’ve acted mostly as passive observers. We’ve set up an account, and started following some accounts, publications, and tags. In the next section, we’ll dive into the more interactive aspects of Medium.

How to Interact With Medium Content

3. Recommend, share and bookmark content.

The “Recommend” is the “Like” of the Medium world. It’s a way to show you that you appreciate the content that someone has shared.

When reading a story on Medium, there are two places where you can recommend it: At the bottom of the actual story, where you see the clapping hand symbol …

Or on the nav bar that appears at the left of the screen when you scroll through a story …

In either case, you’ll need to click on the clapping hand icon you see to recommend a story. Once clicked, the hands will change from an outline to solid green. To see the full list of people who’ve recommended a story, you can click on that little number you see next to the heart. (Note: You can clap up to 50 times per post, and you can clap for as many posts as you want.)

When you recommend a story, the writer, by default, will receive an email notification. (But that’s something you can control in Settings). The more recommends a story receives, the more likely it will be to get shared around the Medium network. Stories that receive the most recommends within a given time period get featured on Medium’s “Top stories” page.

In the same two locations where you can recommend a story, you can also share that story to Twitter or Facebook (by clicking one of the social icons), and you can bookmark the story for later reading by clicking the bookmark icon (which turns solid once clicked).

Once you bookmark a story, it will appear on your “Lists” page, which you can access from Medium’s homepage on the bookmark icon: 

4. Highlight specific words.

In addition to recommending, sharing, and bookmarking Medium stories, you can unlock a second level of interaction by selecting a section of text with your cursor. Once you’ve highlighted some text, a pop-up menu will appear that gives you four options:

1. Highlight: Clicking the highlighter icon (pencil symbol) will put a green highlight around the text you’ve selected, which is visible to your Medium followers. By default, a story’s writer will receive a notification when a section of that story is highlighted.
2. Response: Clicking the speech bubble icon will allow you to write a response to the story you’re reading. The section of text you’ve highlighted will appear at the top of your response. (More on responses in a second!)
3. Text Shot: Clicking the Twitter icon will generate a “Text Shot,” which is a tweet that automatically pulls in the text you’ve highlighted as a screenshot.
4. Private Note: Clicking the lock icon will allow you to send the writer of the story a private note. (Note: This functionality can be turned on and off in your account settings.)

5. Write responses.

Unlike traditional blog comments, Medium responses are treated as individual stories. That means in addition to appearing at the bottoms of the stories you respond to, the responses you write are documented on your profile page, and have the potential to take off and get highly circulated just like traditional stories.

As a newcomer to Medium, writing responses can be a great way to engage with people on the platform without having to commit to writing a full-blown story. It can also help you come up with ideas for your first story when you do decide to write it.

How to Write and Publish on Medium

6. Format text in your posts.

From the Medium homepage, you can access the Medium editor and start writing or laying out a story by clicking on your profile icon at the top-right of the Medium page, and then selecting “Write a story”: 

As you’ll likely discover, writing in Medium’s editor is highly intuitive and — from a stylistic perspective — nearly impossible to screw up.

By highlighting text, you can unveil several basic formatting options, including bold, italics, and hyperlinking. You can also designate text as an H1 or as an H2 (using the big T or little t) …

And you can choose between two different styles of blockquotes. Option A:

And Option B:

Of course, if you really want to get fancy, you can use Medium’s drop caps function. Know those enlarged, stylized letters you sometimes see at the beginning of sentences? Those are drop caps. According to the Medium team, they’re useful for “pacing, starting a new chapter, or just a little typographical delight.”

Another option for creating some separation between different sections of a story in Medium is to use a part, or separator. In order to insert one, you’ll first need to click that little plus icon that appears when you’re on an empty line of your story.

Clicking that plus icon will open up a menu with four options. The one on the far right — the icon with the two little lines — is the separator.

 Here’s what it looks like on the page:

7. Add images and media.

Adding images, videos, and other media (e.g., tweets) to your Medium story can be as simple as copying and pasting their URLs into Medium’s editor. The editor, in most cases, can automatically recognize the media’s format and render it accordingly.

Alternatively, you can click on the plus icon to open the same menu you used to insert the separator in the previous step. From there, you can upload an image from your computer, insert a URL to a video, or insert the embed code to another type of media using the corresponding icons.

Depending on the specific size of the image you upload, you’ll have two different size options to choose from for displaying that image. These size options, which will appear in a pop-up menu after you insert an image, include left-aligned and center-aligned.

By default, Medium will display the formatting option that best fits the dimensions of the image you insert.

8. Share drafts and publish posts.

When you’ve finished your story and are happy with how everything looks, head up to the top nav where you’ll find two links: “Share” and “Publish.”

Clicking “Share” will generate a link to the draft of your story, which you can share with anyone — even if they don’t have a Medium account. And the people you share the draft with will also have the option of leaving you notes.

Clicking the “Publish” button, meanwhile, will open a menu where you can select up to three tags for your story.

Medium will recommend some tags by default, but you can also search for tags and create new ones by simply entering text.

Once you’ve selected tags for your story, you can hit the “Publish” button to share your story with the world.

9. Measure your results.

In order to see how your stories (and responses) are performing, you can go to the “Stats” page using the URL medium.com/me/stats. You can also navigate to the “Stats” page via the dropdown menu at the top right of the Medium homepage (the bell icon).

When you arrive on the “Stats” page, you’ll first see the aggregate number of views, reads, and recommends your stories and responses have received over the past 30 days. There’s also a graph that provides day-by-day granularity. By hovering over a column on the graph, you can view metrics for the specific day to which that column corresponds.

If you keep scrolling down the page, you’ll be able to view the individual stats for each of your stories. Specifically, Medium provides data on views, reads, read ratio, and recommends.

Here’s a quick rundown on what those metrics mean:

1. Views: The number of people who visited a story’s page.
2. Reads: An estimate of how many visitors read a story all the way through.
3. Read Ratio: The percentage of visitors that ends up reading an entire story (i.e., the difference between reads and views). According to Ev Williams, this ratio is an important factor in determining how a story gets ranked/surfaced on Medium.
4. Recommends: The number of recommends a story receives. 

The Medium App 

If you prefer consuming and interacting with content on-the-go, consider downloading the Medium app. The app features the same stories and content you’ll find on desktop, with the added bonus of a mobile-first interface. 

On the app, you can surface content related to your interests. These curated lists depend on the tags, publications, or authors you follow. You can also use the app’s Explore feature to find new, interesting content. Similarly to desktop, you can use the app to engage with fellow Medium readers and join conversations as they’re happening. 

Remember, this was just an introductory look at how to use Medium. There are several more features and options we haven’t covered, but we’ll do so in future posts.

You’ve likely heard of Software as a Service, or SaaS.

A SaaS company sells software to a user as a subscription. Along with that subscription, the software company provides technical support, customer service, and upgrade options to maximize their customers’ ability to use their software.

HubSpot is an example of a SaaS company. We sell (darn good) marketing, sales, and service software so you can use them to grow your business. But there’s just one problem …

Over time, we’ve learned that things aren’t so linear and consumers rarely use just one software to satisfy all of their needs. Instead, they find a plugin here, some software there, and maybe even a widget until they have a smorgasbord of options that, together, create the perfect solution.

Consumer expectations have changed — they want instant feedback, immediate solutions, and access to everything they need to solve their problems.

From a business standpoint, it can be costly to add more tools to your existing software. An ever-increasing demand makes it hard to accommodate every customer need.

Additionally, most software companies have segregated systems themselves, pulling in data from the cloud and on-site systems to complete their own stack. Ascend2 found that 57% of marketers recognize integrating disparate technologies as the biggest barrier to success.

What happens when you have different systems operating on separate platforms that each play an integral role in your business? You become subject to data loss, disjointed information, and misalignment.

Between consumer expectations and internal systems, we need to find a way to create a more frictionless experience.

iPaaS is the solution.

iPaaS is a platform that connects otherwise disjointed systems to deliver a unified solution to customers. It acts as a conduit for communication between multiple systems, allowing for integration and data sharing. As we deepen our cloud dependency, iPaaS becomes integral to nearly every business model.

This guide will give you an overview of iPaaS, how it works, and its key benefits.

Most companies run on various systems, especially between their sales, marketing, and service departments. iPaaS improves communication between different silos by integrating software to better share data within the organization.

iPaaS also allows a company to expand its offering without the need to build out more services. Instead, it can integrate with another software that already provides that service and offer a unified, more robust solution to customers.

For example, say you sell a scheduling software that helps hairstylists book, manage, and send appointment reminders to their clients. After developing your product, you realize that stylists also want their clients to be able to leave reviews and make payments through your software.

To meet your customers’ needs, you could either build out and add these features to your product, or you could use iPaaS to connect your scheduling software to existing review and payment software. The latter approach allows you to save time and money while expanding your service offering and giving your clients what they want.

This is just one of many potential iPaaS use cases to serve both customers and internal teams.

How does iPaaS work?

A software company will rely on iPaaS to supply the infrastructure for creating connections and deploying software applications within the cloud.

The software company sets the parameters for the types of connections that are allowed on the platform. These parameters could be in the form of an application programming interface (API), prebuilt connectors, or some other rule.

Once these rules are in place, iPaaS creates a central ecosystem to view, manage, and modify all data, infrastructure, and operations. This, in turn, allows entities to easily modify their product, share information, and provide solutions to their market.

iPaaS-Related Terms to Know

How do you distinguish between all service-oriented architecture (SOA)? Let’s cover the common cloud-based service business models out there to help you get a better grasp on what makes iPaaS unique.

Platform

A platform is the centralized component of all connections. HubSpot’s VP of Platform Ecosystem Scott Brinker defines a platform as a “hub, with spokes connecting other products to its center. The hub binds those disparate products together and orchestrates them in a common mission.”

Integration Platform

An integration platform creates connections between different applications and systems. This type of platform creates an environment for engineers to build upon.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

A PaaS is a platform where the provider houses all of the elements that users need to deploy a particular software. Those elements include the servers, network, memory, database, and operating system.

Software

Software is a program that performs a specific set of tasks for a user.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

SaaS is a system where a user is provided with software to use on-demand. All maintenance, hosting, and deployment of that software is the responsibility of the software provider.

Integration as a Service (IaaS)

IaaS is a cloud-based model that allows for data integration between systems and third-party vendors. IaaS keeps all connected parties from having to create complex interdependencies and minimizes delays in data sharing.

Electronic Service Bus (ESB)

Electronic Service Bus is not denoted “as a service,” but it could be considered a predecessor of iPaaS. An ESB is a middleware tool, which means that it works between applications the same way an iPaaS does. While iPaaS focuses on integration, an ESB has two functions: integrating and distributing data and messages.

Since ESBs were created before the cloud, they operate on-premises. They are still a reliable option for legacy systems.

iPaaS vs. PaaS

Although iPaaS and PaaS are only one letter apart, their functionalities are completely different.

A PaaS is basically a toolbox with generic features that developers can use to build their own applications.

PaaS supports different aspects of an application. Next to the development tools, PaaS vendors provide operating systems, business analytics, storage options, and data management solutions. With this last option, your developers might be able to build data integrations without too much hassle. Usually, companies working with this type of vendor are medium-sized enterprises.

Smaller businesses working with different applications will need an iPaaS at some point. The main reason is that those applications are not created by the same vendors. They are not connected natively, while the applications built on a PaaS usually live within the same environment.

Like PaaS, some iPaaS providers offer a very complete set of features. The difference is that those features are exclusively focused on integration.

Last but not least, to work with PaaS, you’ll need a team of developers. On the other hand, iPaaS tools are usually created so that anyone in any team can create an integration with no coding required.

iPaaS vs. ESB

ESB and iPaaS are bridges between two applications, but they offer completely different solutions. The first distinction is that an ESB works on-premises, while iPaaS are cloud-based solutions. That doesn’t mean that an ESB won’t be able to integrate with a cloud application, but it makes the connection less viable.

Scalability is also different for ESB and iPaaS. In a company using iPaaS, integrating new applications is easy. iPaaS usually allows you to create as many connections as you want between the hundreds of applications they support. However, in a company working with ESB, it can take months to implement a new app.

Another variable to consider is multitenancy. This concept refers to the possibility of having several users accessing the same software. iPaaS and other cloud-based software usually support multitenancy. On the other hand, considering that ESB requires a piece of hardware to operate, multitenancy is very hard to guarantee.

Benefits of iPaaS

The rise of SaaS over the past two decades created a gap in the ecosystem that needed to be filled. That gap — the need for more integrated systems — has only become more apparent. iPaaS arose out of a need for an organized solution for deploying quick and seamless cloud-based solutions.

You can think about the benefits of iPaaS as two-fold: benefits to the company that employs iPaaS (internal) and benefits to the customers of the company that employs iPaas (external).

External Benefits

Software companies that employ iPaaS technology as part of their offering to consumers reap benefits from increased customer satisfaction. Consumers benefit from iPaaS in a number of ways.

A Single Solution

Instead of piecing together separate software to solve their needs, consumers can use a platform that connects to all of their software in one convenient cloud-based location, thereby eliminating the need to source and deploy their technology in different environments.

Organized Data

Consumers can access all of their data in one place and set rules for how that data is organized and accessed. So, while they’re working with different systems, all of those systems will render data in an easy-to-interpret manner. All of this makes data analysis, interpretation, and application easier and more accurate.

Improved Communication

One platform means a single source of truth. Data is being shared within the same ecosystem so no important information is lost and everyone has the same access, which leaves less room for misinterpretation.

Better Workflow

Less time switching between tools means more time for work and a central place where all of that work is done. A platform creates a more efficient environment for team dynamics and workflows.

Internal Benefits

Consumers aren’t the only ones who need integrated solutions. Companies also use disparate tools to run their businesses — think email providers, marketing software, document sharing, the list goes on. iPaaS brings these tools together to increase internal efficiency and improve workflows.

Here are some of the internal benefits of iPaaS.

Eliminate Silos

Third-party integrations can be created and deployed in various environments. This might not be an issue when there are only a few connections, however, as a company develops its offerings to become a more robust entity, integrations can become scattered, creating a mess where information is hidden from view or difficult to access and preventing a business from realizing critical insights.

Real-Time Processing

iPaaS allows for real-time data sharing and processing thereby eliminating delays in access and providing a quick and accessible solution.

Increased Efficiency

iPaaS mitigates confusion, data loss, and inconsistencies by creating a centralized system for the management of all parties involved.

Centralized Management

iPaaS creates a single, virtual view for managing all connections across the platform. Instead of having one individual or team manage different integrations, all of them can be accessed from a single console.

Multitenancy

Typically, each tenant that calls upon software requires its own instance. Similar to how every person on a call needs their own phone connection, an instance is created each time someone accesses the software. iPaaS allows for shared instances among tenants, eliminating overload, reducing costs, and increasing the speed of use.

Improved Security and Compliance

Security threats are inevitable in any environment, especially the cloud. iPaaS solutions offer fraud detection and intruder alerts. But the real benefit is that a centralized platform makes it easier to see where these threats are and respond adequately. In addition, a platform makes regulation compliance simple by implementing changes in a single environment.

Gartner iPaaS Magic Quadrant

Being that iPaaS is a newer technology, we look to objective opinions to check the validity, safety, and potential longevity of iPaaS vendors. Gartner iPaaS Magic Quadrant is that resource.

Gartner is an IT consulting firm and trusted resource for objective, qualitative industry research. According to Gartner, “Magic Quadrants offer visual snapshots, in-depth analyses and actionable advice that provide insight into a market’s direction, maturity, and participants.”

The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration as a Service looks at several iPaaS vendors in the space and details the strengths and cautions of each provider. It compares vendors like Boomi, Jitterbit, MuleSoft, Oracle, and SAP among several others to provide an objective view on the iPaaS environment and to give readers perspective on which solution would best fit their needs.

iPaaS Integration: Best Practices

iPaaS is an outstanding solution to integrate your business’s technology ecosystem and to enhance its data flow. In order to get the most out of it, make sure to follow these best practices:

Have a data integration plan before implementing an iPaaS solution.

It’s crucial to decide on a sound data integration plan before you begin syncing your data between multiple apps. For your plan to be successful, you need to:

• Define the goals you want to achieve with data integration. For example, you may want to integrate internal business data to have a holistic view of your business and build better analytics reports. Or you might want to integrate customer data from different applications to have a 360-degree view of your customers.
• Decide what kind of data you want to integrate. Once your data integration goals are set, you will have a much clearer idea of what kind of data you need to integrate. iPaaS platforms set algorithms to sync the same type of ‘object’ between apps. These objects can be names, emails, deals details, service tickets, etc. However, not every iPaaS can integrate all the objects of your apps. Determining which kind of data you need to integrate is key to decide which iPaaS to use.
• Find out where this data lives. In which applications are you storing this information? These are the tools you’ll want to integrate with iPaaS. For example, if you want to sync customer data, find out which applications are collecting it across your business.
• Figure out how the data should flow. Decide how the data needs to flow between your tools. You might need one-way, trigger-action data pushes, or you might need a real-time, two-way synchronization.

Choose the right iPaaS solution for your business.

Different iPaaS tools suit different purposes. There are iPaaS tools that work perfectly to automate workflows between several tools, such as Zapier.

Once you’ve honed in on your integration needs, you’ll be in a better position to decide which iPaaS tool will work for you. Take time to research your options thoroughly and determine which tool is the best option to help you achieve your data integration goals. We’ve included a list of top iPaaS vendors to help you get started with your search.

Set up your iPaaS tool properly.

iPaaS solutions hold a multitude of possibilities. Most of them will allow you to get really specific in your integration. Features such as rules and field mappings enable you to decide which groups of data to share between applications (in case you don’t want to share your entire database). You can also pair different kinds of information between your tools.

For example, you can add a “New Customer” label to certain contacts in your CRM to identify your newest customers. You can then sync this label into your email marketing tool and automatically enroll these new customers in an onboarding email sequence that sends them all necessary resources, useful links, and who to contact within your organization if they have any questions or issues.

Manage your data.

While iPaaS will do a lot of the work for you when it comes to data management, it’s still important to manually check in on your databases every so often.

This includes making sure your data is rid of duplicates, cleaning up invalid contact details, keeping your data fresh and deleting outdated information, and implementing consistent, company-wide procedures for data entry and management.

In addition, remember to check your syncs to make sure they are running smoothly and your data is flowing as it should.

iPaaS Vendors

iPaaS is a great solution to improve connection to and communication between all data and applications within your company. We’ve compiled this list of iPaaS vendors to help narrow your search for the perfect iPaaS partner. For more recommendations, see our full list of iPaas vendors.

Workato

Workato enables all your teams to create and easily maintain integrations between the different systems that power your business. This iPaaS solution comes equipped with 150,000+ “recipes” — or automated workflows that connect apps and complete tasks based on a combination of apps, triggers, and actions — so it’s easy to hit the ground running with out-of-the-box integrations.

Dell Boomi

Dell Boomi offers a complete iPaaS solution with application and data integration, workflow automation, application deployment, API design, and B2B management all within a single master hub.

Informatica

Informatica boasts customer loyalty and top-ranked iPaaS provider as their main advantages over other solutions. With a nod from Gartner and over seven thousand customers worldwide, the iPaaS vendor holds a top spot in the industry.

Celigo

Celigo offers an iPaaS solution that can handle everything from simple FTP integrations to complex integration needs. In addition, Celigo’s application marketplace features vetted apps that solve for a multitude of business needs.

Jitterbit

Jitterbit understands the stress of building APIs between on-premise and cloud-based systems. The company has done well to empathize with businesses that lack the resources to build these integrations on their own and offers quick integrations with their platform as a result.

Blendr.io

Blendr.io offers a low-code visual builder to create complex enterprise-grade or standardized self-service integrations. In addition, Blendr.io provides a set of features to embed integrations into the UI of other SaaS platforms.

Mulesoft

Mulesoft offers cloud integration through its product called “CloudHub.” This solution offers multitenancy for integrations and API. The solution allows for deployment in eight different regions around the world, a number of workers, and out-of-the-box cloud security, and compliance. It also offers insights based on various metrics.

Zapier

Zapier is a well-known solution for connecting apps, automating workflows, and sharing data between otherwise disjointed systems.

iPaaS providers don’t stop there. You can view and compare dozens of vendors through a bit of research. Otherwise, Gartner has already done the work for you.

Get Integrated

As we continue to move towards cloud-based options, iPaaS becomes the most viable solution to eliminate the friction associated with disparate systems, and for connecting all applications and data between your organization and third parties. A single source that connects all of the systems we use to grow our businesses is an important step toward growing better. When we’re connected and in-sync, we can go further together.

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

Facebook Groups are nothing new to the marketing world, but they present a variety of interesting business opportunities.

They’re an excellent place for two-way communication between businesses and customers. And if a Group is public, it’s a great place for prospects to learn about your brand, products, mission, and current customers as well.

Ultimately, Facebook Groups give businesses the chance to engage with their audience in a more meaningful and authentic way than they ever could using their Page.

Here are eigth Facebook Groups that are crushing it to help inspire your future Facebook marketing strategy.

The purpose of this list is to provide you with the business and marketing inspiration you need to create, maintain, and manage a Group that your prospects and customers love.

1.HubSpot Academy Content Marketing Pros

Members: 27.1K

HubSpot Academy’s Content Marketing Pros Group is a private group — meaning, members need to request to be a part of it. Once in the group, members can share ideas about content challenges and projects they’re working on as well as how they’re using or plan to use HubSpot in order to help them with those challenges and/or projects.

Members can share details about courses they’ve taken and how they’ve applied the lessons learned to their content marketing roles. They can also list ideas for courses they would like to see HubSpot Academy produce in the future.

The way that this Group is set up encourages a sense of community among customers and users as well as offers a space for them to provide actionable feedback and insights about the Group and/or product in discussion.

2. Instant Pot

Members: 3M

This popular electric cooker brand uses its Group to create a space where the international community of Instant Pot users can ask questions, post unique recipes, and share the joy of cooking with their products.

They also offer limited trouble-shooting in the case that any customers experience any issues or have product-specific questions. They rarely ever promote their products within the Group, outside of the occasional giveaway where members can enter to win prizes to use with their Instant Pot.

3. Women of Impact by National Geographic

Members: 71.8K

When it comes to the art of inspiring and being a voice for change, there are very few who do it quite as well as National Geographic. This group, Women of Impact, focuses on “celebrating world-shaping powerhouses” and encourages anyone who’s passionate about women breaking barriers in their fields to join.

The publication uses Facebook Groups to connect with their audience members in a way that aligns with issues and initiatives that they, and those audience members, care deeply about.

4. Elementor

Members: 115K

Elementor, a WordPress page builder plugin, has a private Facebook Group that, on average, sees over 4,400 posts every month. The Group exists to serve as a place where Elementor users can help each other learn how to use the page builder and answer any questions or resolve any challenges they may be experiencing.

The group is managed by volunteers which just highlights the fact that Elementor isn’t using the community for promotional reasons but rather as a place where community members can communicate, collaborate, and encourage each other, as well as self educate.‏‏‎ ‎

5. Official Peloton Member Page

Members:430.2K

The Official Peloton Member Page is a private Group where customers and users can come together to discuss Peloton products including Bike, Tread, and Digital. It also serves a hub where those customers and users can learn about Peloton’s latest announcements, feature roll outs, and product updates.

And when it comes to exercise, this type of network or group provides value to its members as they’re able to share exercise plans, techniques, schedules, and training methods with one another.

6. MobileMonkey

Members:44.0K

MobileMonkey’s Group is product-specific and provides an environment where members can ask questions and share knowledge about MobileMonkey’s Instagram and Facebook Messenger, SMS & Chatbot Marketing products.

In this group, social media marketers, inbound marketers, PPC marketers, advertisers, entrepreneurs, and more can turn to each other and the resources available in the Group to determine the best ways to use and resolve challenges around MobileMonkey’s main products (including multi-channel chat marketing for Messenger, native web chat, Facebook ad platform, and SMS marketing).

7. Canva Design Circle

Members: 145.1K

Canva Design Circle is where members can learn how to take advantage of the product and its many features and functions through their Design School. Within the Group, Canva users are notified of the most recent product updates and tips and can discuss any topic related to design.

Canva encourages new members of the Group to introduce themselves upon entry. This fosters a sense of community, trust, and belonging the moment one enters. That warm welcome leads to more introductions among other members in the Group and conversations about design work, projects, jobs, challenges, etc.

8. Tasty

Members: 89.8K

Tasty Facebook Group Members share recipes, ideas for substitutes, and cooking tips. The group drives engagement by encouraging members to share their recipes in order to stand a chance of having that recipe featured on their website. They also run polls related to cooking and baking based on trends, season, holidays, and more.

By creating these competitions, incentives, and group activities, the company drives engagement on the page — they encourage members to interact and connect with one another which fosters a sense of community and camaraderie among Tasty fans.

Get the Facebook Group Inspiration You Need

A Facebook Group can be a powerful way to create a community around your brand and product or service. It’s where your prospects and customers can come to connect with one another and your business — this community, support, access to self-education, and brand awareness is an effective way to foster loyalty and delightful customer experiences that keep people coming back.

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

Whether you’re a UX designer, freelance writer, or photographer, an impressive online portfolio is critical for impressing potential clients, and landing future jobs.

But crafting a good digital portfolio can feel like a daunting task, especially when you aren’t even sure which website you should use to create one. Here, we’ve created a list of the nine best portfolio websites for designers, freelancers, and photographers, to ensure you’re able to showcase your best work in any industry.

What is an online portfolio?

An online portfolio is a collection of your work that showcases your skills and abilities. A portfolio should include your past work experiences, qualifications and skills, degrees or certifications you’ve completed, any awards or accolades you’ve earned, as well as some examples of your work. Examples of your work might be photographs, writing samples, case studies, spreadsheets, or lesson plans, depending on your field.

Best Free Portfolio Websites for Freelance Writers

1. Journo Portfolio

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On Journo Portfolio you can create a sleek, modern digital portfolio easily. The site offers nine distinct themes, and adding an article is as easy as pasting a URL and clicking add — the site takes care of incorporating the title, publication, date, content, and image. Features include the ability to integrate with Google Analytics or use Journo’s built-in analytics tools to measure visitors. Additionally, your site is automatically mobile-ready.

You can also blog straight from the platform, which could be useful if you want to showcase freelance work and your current blog in one place. Journo lets you create multiple pages, so you can have a Contact Me or About Me page, as well as your freelance portfolio.

Pros

• Live preview editor
• Built-in analytics plus Google Analytics integration
• Pre-built themes
• Subscribe and contact forms
• Mobile-friendly

Cons

• Free plan limits you to 10 articles max
• For unlimited articles, you’ll need to pay $5-$10 per month

2. Muck Rack

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Muck Rack is a free media database that helps connect journalists with PR professionals, so if you use the site, you’ll have good opportunities to network and receive PR pitches. You can even include specific topics you don’t want to cover, which will filter out unfit pitches.

Additionally, for true ease-of-use, Muck Rack creates and maintains your portfolio for you by automatically compiling articles and social media profiles. Once it’s finished, you have the option to customize your bio, or choose to spotlight certain pieces.

Muck Rack also offers a news alerts system, which enables you to track stories or tweets about a company, brand, or specific story angle. With their news alerts system, you can see when other journalists share information or publish stories related to your work, which will help you stay on-top of trends.

Pros

• Ideal for journalists
• Auto-updates profile
• News alerts system for tracking stories and trends
• Allows you to easily build media lists

Cons

• Some formatting issues when uploading content from Excel
• Does not integrate with other reporting and monitoring tools

3. WordPress.com

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WordPress, a major content management platform, lets you create a blog with a separate portfolio page for free. While not specifically geared towards freelance writers, WordPress offers over 100 free themes to craft a unique blog and showcase your work. If you want complete creative control over your portfolio, this is a good option for you.

Additionally, you might choose to use WordPress if you want to showcase your writing along with other skills — if you want a page for writing and a page for your photography, for instance, WordPress offers a variety of themes and is flexible enough to enable you to demonstrate various pieces of creative work.

Pros

• Ideal for bloggers
• Can create portfolio page separate from blog
• 100+ free themes available
• Comes with SSL certificate and JetPack features for improving website performance

Cons

• Free plan shows ads
• Limited storage at 3 GB

Best Free Portfolio Websites for Designers

4. Behance

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With millions of UX/UI designers, artists, and photographers on the site, Behance is one of the most widely-used online portfolio websites. It’s also extremely simple and easy to use — you can organize your work based on project, list projects under construction, and ask followers for feedback. Additionally, the site allows you to link your portfolio to your social media accounts.

Behance’s massive digital community makes it a good option to get your name out there, particularly since recruiters and interviewers peruse the site to find talent, as well. However, Behance displays the number of people who have viewed your work and liked it, which can be more advantageous — but riskier — than a more straightforward website portfolio.

Pros

• Ideal for creatives who don’t have time to create their own standalone portfolio site
• Can get feedback from followers
• Includes social proof in terms of views and likes on portfolio site

Cons

• Limited design and feature options on free plan
• The display of views and likes can be risky if not enough people see or appreciate a project 

5. Adobe Portfolio

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If you already have a Creative Cloud membership, then Adobe Portfolio is an excellent option to create a single-page website, or a full gallery of your work. With Adobe Portfolio you’re able to set up a sleek and customized portfolio in minutes, and each of the platform’s themes are automatically optimized for any device.

Additionally, Adobe Portfolio offers the ability to integrate with Behance and Adobe Lightroom to import your projects for greater visibility. 

Pros

• Option to create multi- or single-page website
• Offers 18 responsive themes
• Integrations with Behance and Adobe Lightroom

Cons

• Only free if have Creative Cloud membership

6. Crevado

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One of the easiest free portfolio websites, Crevado lets you use a simple drag-and-drop tool to upload your projects and rearrange on the screen for true ease-of-use. The site is also automatically optimized for any device, so your portfolio can be viewed on a smartphone or tablet as well as a desktop.

Crevado also comes with secure hosting and SSL certification so your portfolio site remains secure. You can customize your design to suit your preferences without writing any code. Best of all, you can sell your work online thanks to the platform’s integrations with PayPal and Fotomoto.  

The only downside is that free users can’t remove the link to Crevado in their website footer. You’ll have to upgrade to a pro account to do so.

Pros

• Drag-and-drop interface 
• Responsive designs
• Secure hosting and SSL certification
• PayPal and Fotomoto integrations allow you to sell work

Cons

• Free plan shows Crevado link in website footer 

Best Free Portfolio Websites for Photographers

7. Flickr

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Undoubtedly one of the most well-known portfolio sites with billions of photos and millions of members, Flickr is a good site to share your own work, connect with other photographers, and find inspiration for future projects.

However, Flickr’s community-oriented platform can make it difficult to showcase your best work and appear professional — particularly since the site is typically used to share images with friends and family. For this reason, many designers also suggest creating a more polished portfolio website, and then linking to that website from Flickr. 

Pros

• Ideal for photographers just starting out
• Great to connect with others and find inspiration

Cons

• Limited to GIF, PNG, and JPEG photo formats 
• Limited to 1,000 photos on free plan
• Will likely outgrow the site as you advance

8. Portfoliobox

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Portfoliobox is a website builder specifically designed for photographers, and it’s a good option for crafting a professional-looking responsive gallery of your best work. Additionally, Portfoliobox offers an ecommerce link that allows you to sell your prints or other artwork directly from the site (without paying any commission). With the free plan, you can create a blog to further attract visitors and potential customers to your site.

Best of all, Portfoliobox doesn’t make you use a standard theme — instead, you can integrate any style for any page to cultivate a unique, one-of-a-kind website. With more than one million users, it’s a good option for both professional and novice photographers.

Pros

• Ideal for photographers at any skill level
• Can sell prints on this site commission-free
• Can use different style for every page

Cons

• No drag-and-drop functionality
• Limited customization options for ecommerce

9. YouPic

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YouPic’s users include famous photographers like Joel Meyerowitz and Julia Fullerton-Batten. Another site specifically designed for photographers, YouPic enables you to craft a free stunning portfolio to showcase your work. It also allows you to buy prints from other photographers or sell your own to make some additional income.

Additionally, the site offers interactive courses to improve your photography skills, as well as a Pinterest-style “Explore” page that lets you check out popular photographs, new artwork, and stories to inspire your own gallery. And, most interesting to note, YouPic allows users the opportunity to copyright their photos on the blockchain, and is the first decentralized photography platform. That means YouPic is one of the few platforms that won’t take any rights or ownership of your work. 

Pros

• Can sell prints on this site commission-free
• Can copyright photos on blockchain
• Doesn’t take any rights or ownership of your work

Cons

• Have to upgrade to premium membership for YouPic to promote your work

For further inspiration, check out 21 Memorable Photography Portfolio Websites to Inspire You or The 12 Best Graphic Design Portfolios We’ve Ever Seen, & How to Start Your Own.

Creating Your Online Portfolio

An online portfolio provides evidence of your work and skills, which can set you apart from other candidates or professionals in your field. Using any of the tools above, you can create a free portfolio in no time. What are you waiting for?

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

In college, I took an advertising class. It taught me what I needed to know about traditional advertising, but the social media portion wasn’t as expansive.

When we covered Facebook Advertising, for example, I found it difficult to follow along with a lack of examples and the lofty overview of content. Because of that, I decided to look online for a deeper take on the subject.

I ended up watching a video that covered a subject I’d struggled with in class — retargeting. The video gave an overview of the concept, then went in-depth about how that looks on Facebook with vibrant examples, really helping a visual learner like me.

 

If you’ve never used retargeting before, don’t worry — in the following post, we’ll go through the basics of how retargeting works, explain how you can use it to support your larger marketing goals, and outline an example of a Facebook Ad retargeting campaign.

How Retargeting Campaigns Work

There are two main types of retargeting: pixel-based and list-based. The way each works is slightly different, and each has different advantages based on your campaign goals.

Pixel-Based Retargeting

Pixel-based retargeting is a way to re-display your material to any anonymous site visitor.

This is probably the most common type of retargeting. When someone comes to your website, an unobtrusive piece of JavaScript (often referred to as a pixel) is placed on their browser — making their browser “cookie-d.” When they leave your site to surf the web, that cookie notifies retargeting platforms to serve specific ads based on the specific pages they visited on your website.

The advantage of pixel-based retargeting is that it is timely (they can be retargeted pretty immediately after leaving your site), specific to a particular page on your site, and behavior-based. Downsides to this method are that there is a lower volume of people in the campaign at any given moment in time since it’s all based on how often people are coming to your website, viewing certain pages, and leaving. It also can be complicated or time-intensive to implement JavaScript on many website pages.

List-Based Retargeting

List-based retargeting works after you already have someone’s contact information in your database.

You can also use lists of your existing contacts for certain types of retargeting ads. To do this, upload a list of the email addresses to a retargeting campaign (usually on a social network like Facebook or Twitter), and the platform will identify users on that network who have those addresses and serve retargeting ads just to them.

Though it’s a little less common than pixel-based retargeting, list-based retargeting allows you to have highly customizable criteria for your ads because it’s based on more than behavior — you’re choosing who goes in which list.

On the flip side, it’s possible that a person in your list gave you one email address and the social network another — and in that case, they won’t see your ads. Also keep in mind that because you are in charge of uploading and maintaining the list, list-based retargeting also is less automatic and timely than pixel-based retargeting.

If you’ve ever heard of the term “retargeting,” it’s likely it was in comparison to remarketing. And while the two are often mistaken for each other, they do have differences. Let’s talk about when you would use either.

Remarketing and retargeting are often confused with each other. Though they share similarities, retargeting allows you to reach new prospects with your ads, while remarketing focuses on re-sparking interest of your company to current or inactive old customers.

A retargeted ad helps those who’ve never heard of your company understand how your product or service fits into their lifestyle or solves a potential problem. Retargeting helps you make the message more personal.

When you analyze sales, you can determine what’s popular among the audiences you’re aiming to reach. For instance, if you find that a certain line of products perform really well among millennials, pull images of them into a carousel ad and use it to retarget customers. The personalization of a separate ad promoting a collection, aimed at a segment of your target market, is one example of how retargeting can be successful.

Take this ad I saw today. Despite never having made a purchase from Nasty Gal, this ad showed up on my News Feed:

This ad introduces Nasty Gal to new leads (like me) by giving an overview of diverse clothes that are popular among target audiences.

It’s likely I saw this ad because I fit into Nasty Gal’s target audience set on Facebook, and because my previous behavior on the social channel involved looking for reviews of similar clothing retailers.

On the other hand, to re-engage a lost or inactive customer, you might decide to use remarketing. This tactic aims to improve customer relationships by utilizing marketing tactics that

Essentially, if you want to give customers an incentive to purchase again from your company, turn to remarketing.

For customers that are already acquainted with your brand and have shown a need for your product, create a personalized message to reignite their interest. For example, if your company offers a membership, remarket to those whose memberships are expiring and are up for renewal. This email I received is an example:

This marketing email not only served as a reminder to renew my subscription but was also Thrive Market‘s way of reminding me about the benefits of being a member. In the email, I got to see how much I saved by using the grocery service, where my membership money was being spent, and was offered a special promotion to renew.

Because I was already familiar with the brand, Thrive was able to use the email to add personal touches and provide a snapshot of what I can enjoy (again) as a member.

Like retargeting, this tactic is successful when messages inspire action. The email’s CTAs, like “Browse our options here!” told me that I could peruse my options in one click, so I did. Use remarketing efforts to remind customers of the perks that come with shopping with your brand, like easy shopping access.

Retargeting Ad Goals

Now that we have the background for how retargeting works and the different types of audiences you can segment by, we can focus on goals. The main types of retargeting campaigns you should consider running are those for awareness and those for conversion.

To generate awareness.

Awareness campaigns are useful when you want to re-engage website visitors and tell them about relevant products, features, or announcements. These ads are usually served to pixel-based lists.

The obvious drawback to awareness campaigns is that you’re serving less targeted content to people who haven’t engaged heavily with your brand. They’re not in your contacts database, and often, there are lower expected clickthrough rates than other types of campaigns.

However, since the goal is to make prospects aware of your business, impressions and engagement are acceptable metrics to track. Often awareness campaigns are precursors to a much more effective campaign goal: conversions.

To drive conversions.

Conversion goals are just that — you want to get people to click on your ad and take a next step, such as filling out a landing page form. Conversion campaigns are best used to align a specific list with a clear next step in the flywheel, and can be measured with typical conversion metrics like website clicks, form submission, and cost-per-lead (CPL).

The best thing about a conversion campaign is that you can use it for multiple parts of the flywheel. Pixel-based ads, for instance, generate leads and will direct people to landing pages where they can give over their information.

List-based ads better qualify those leads. Ads will appear to contacts who gave you limited information and lead them to longer forms with additional fields.

To complete the buyer’s journey.

Additionally, retargeting can be used to move qualified leads to complete the buyer’s journey cycle. For example, you might use retargeting to send a list of contacts that have downloaded an ebook an invite to sign up for a free trial of your product. When they see how your tool can help them meet their goals, they may be inspired to become a paying customer.

To increase customer lifetime value (CLTV).

Customer lifetime value is the amount of money you can expect from a single customer throughout their entire relationship with your business. When using retargeting, customers are reminded of your brand and encouraged to continue making purchases. The more purchases they make, the higher their CLTV.

To reduce cart abandonment.

Cart abandonment is when a customer places something in their shopping cart in your online store, but leaves your website instead of checking out and making a payment. Retargeting can help you recover these customers that have abandoned their carts and serve as a reminder that the item they were interested in is still available and ready for purchase.

To introduce new products.

When you know that customers have visited your website, made a purchase, or shown general interest in your business, retargeting helps you share new products with them that align with their interests. When they see your ads, you can lead them directly back to your site to discover your new product and entice them to follow through with a purchase.

Regardless of your goal, it is important to align the positioning, creative, and next step in the conversion process — whether that’s an offer landing page, site page, or request for more information — with your audience list.

List-based retargeting can have low match rates (users synced with accounts on each platform, usually by email address), so make sure you’re fueling your retargeting activities with inbound content.

Retargeting Platform and Tools

Truthfully, you’ve got quite a few options for actually implementing your retargeting. Specific platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn offer native tools, and there are also tons of third-party platforms to do web and social retargeting, and we’ll recommend some below.

SharpSpring Ads

SharpSpring Ads, formerly Perfect Audience, is a retargeting tool that allows you to create dynamic retargeting ads and display them in newsfeeds, websites, and social media platforms for your audience members to see. You can measure the impact of your campaigns to ensure you’re on the right track, and use their powerful analytics to get up-to-date information on click through rate (CTR), revenue, and conversions.

AdRoll

AdRoll uses 10+ years of consumer data and behavior to help you create retargeting ads that are effective, relevant, and shown to your audience on the platforms they frequently use. If you’re a HubSpot user, AdRoll can integrate with Marketing Hub, helping you easily sync your existing contacts and create a list of targetable audience members.

ReTargeter

ReTargeter helps you create campaigns that are customized to your individual business needs and will help you stand out from your competitors. With this high-quality tool, you’ll be able to keep your business top of mind with your audience, wherever they spend time online.

Criterio

Criterio helps you retarget your audience through contextual retargeting, where they use commerce data from your existing customers to understand which channels have been successful in inspiring purchases in the past. Your ads are then placed in these same channels for users to see, as they have shown to be high-impact and effective.

While email targeting can be effective, it’s important to note many of the other platforms that could also be beneficial. Although each platform you use to implement ads will be different, there are some advantages and disadvantages for choosing ones that serve up social media ads or elsewhere on the web.

Social media retargeting often works well since people are more likely to share, reply, and discuss your content on one of these well-known platforms. They can also see the ads are posted from a real account, as opposed to a small web banner ad with little text that could be posted by anyone. That being said, web retargeting works well for impressions since the ads follow your targeted audience throughout the internet, not just on a few specific social media sites.

What ad tracking method should you use to retarget people on social media who have visited your website?

If you choose to use social media as your channel for retargeting those that have visited your website, the best ad tracking method to use is to use tracking pixels.

As mentioned above, tracking pixels are pieces of code that collect information on the pages your users visit on your website. When they leave your site and go to a social media platform, they are retargeted with ads that are relevant to the pages they visit on your website.

Want to see what setting up a remarketing campaign is like? We’ll walk through a step-by-step process for setting up a retargeting campaign on Facebook and measuring its success.

Facebook Retargeting

Facebook retargeting is no different from the other types of retargeting we’ve talked about — It helps you advertise to potential customers and lost leads. Facebook’s technology leverages data from different profiles to help you connect with the right audience. Data, like web behavior, is used to show your ads on the right news feeds.

On Facebook, you have the advantage of its large audience. Coupled with the amount of data Facebook collects about its users, it’s highly likely that the leads you lost are seeing your ad. The website looks at the previous search history of users and pulls ads that are relevant.

For example, every time I online shop for clothes and leave the site without making a purchase, the ads I see on Facebook are from the store I’d visited. If I were to use the search bar on the social media network, I would see similar results.

To run a retargeting campaign on Facebook, you’ll set an ad campaign and choose your audience set — just like a regular campaign. The difference is this: In Ad Manager, you’ll toggle a switch that tells the website that the campaign is a retargeting one. That way, the software will know how to filter the right target market for your ad.

For this example, we’ll pretend we’re setting up a remarketing campaign for HubSpot. To drive qualified leads to a free trial, we’ll set up a mock Facebook retargeting campaign for leads in our database who we know are interested in marketing automation. Here’s how we would set up that campaign.

1. Create a list of existing contacts, or gather groups from pixel on your website.

First, you’d need a list of leads to retarget. In your marketing software of choice, compile a list based on two criteria: lifecycle stage, interests based on the topic of their most recent download. If this list is sufficiently large, you can move on to the next step. If it’s not, you should revisit your segmentation properties and/or type of retargeting.

2. Upload the list to Facebook’s Audience Manager.

Once our list is processed, we can export the .CSV file and import it into Facebook’s Custom Audience manager to match email addresses with Facebook Profiles. (There are third-party platforms that also sync these lists on social media, so feel free to pick which upload/sync option works best for your company.)

Select “Manage Your Ads” on Facebook’s advertising home page, click “Audiences” on the left toolbar. This will allow you to create a customer list by uploading a .CSV or .TXT file and options to sort by user ID, phone numbers, or emails.

Give your list an appropriate name to easily find it later. Additionally, leave at least a few hours for it to populate. if you try to create an ad immediately, the audience may not be fully loaded.

Aside from Facebook retargeting, Audience Manager will allow you to do standard targeting, which allows you to set demographic, geographic, and other audience targets for an ad — even without a retargeting list.

3. Determine your destination URL.

To create a new campaign on Facebook, hit the green “Create Ad” button in the top right of the ad platform home screen. This will prompt you to choose an objective for your campaign. Whatever option you select, include a UTM tracking code — a snippet of text added to the end of your URL — to help you track success and attribute clicks and conversions from your campaigns. For example, we would create a campaign called “Retargeting” and our URL for the free trial would look like:

http://offers.hubspotm/free-trial?utm_campaign=retargeting&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

Once you create your URL, give your campaign a name. Keep similar names for your campaigns to make it easier to track if you have multiple running.

4. Segment your ads.

Select your custom audience and set the geographic location you want to target. The location is an “AND” setting, meaning if your list contains leads from all over the world and you only select “United States,” some people won’t be shown your ads.

Depending on your buyer personas, you can also segment by interest, behaviors, age, and other demographic settings which can help ads become even more targeted. For conversion campaigns, you’re retargeting to a specific list of contacts already interested in your product, so including other Facebook categories might not make sense.

5. Set your budget.

Before even starting the campaign, have a set budget for paid tactics, broken out by channel. For Facebook campaigns, set a lifetime budget for the length of the campaign, then monitor and adjust accordingly. Most beginners should leave the bidding to “Optimize for Website Click.”

You can also name your ad set at this stage, which is helpful if you’d like to differentiate lists, creative, budget, etc. for different ad sets in the same campaign (i.e. leading to the same page).

6. Creating your ad.

Each ad can have up to six images associated with it, so you can test which ones perform the best.Remember to be clear and concise with your positioning, and include relevant call-to-action buttons such as Shop Now, Learn more, Download, etc. on the bottom right of the ad.

By default, ads are shown on mobile newsfeeds, on the right column on desktops, and in partner mobile apps. Depending on where you’d like your customers to see these campaigns, you may want to turn one or all of those options off to only display in the desktop News Feed.

Some important details on Facebook ads:

• Image size is 1080 x 1080 pixels.
• Text can be used in headlines, but there are character limits depending on ad type.
• Under “Advanced Options” you can write a News Feed link description to better explain your ad and give context to users.

Once you have everything set up, go ahead and click the “Publish” button in the bottom right of the screen.

7. Tracking your progress.

Congratulations, you’ve now created a conversion-based retargeting ad on Facebook! Now you can track website clicks, reach, CTR, CPC, and total spend to match them up to your initial goals.

You can get a glance of how your Facebook retargeting campaigns are doing by going to your Facebook Advertising home page. If you want to dive further into the ad’s metrics, you can go into the ad set where you’ll see information like clicks and spending per day. It is also easy to make edits to your ad from this screen, such as extending the budget, schedule, and creative assets.

If you’re using a CRM, like HubSpot, most offer tools to look at the performance of your destination URL to track views, clicks, and submissions back to specific retargeting campaigns.

Retargeting is a great way to keep your prospects engaged and interact with people who have already shown interest in your company.

While it may sound like a simple enough concept, there are many aspects of a retargeting campaign that must be worked out before you make the ad copy and creative. Be sure to give enough time to make your lists, set goals and types of campaigns, determine the platforms your ads will run on, and tie the whole conversion path together.

If you could do one thing to dramatically improve your marketing ROI today, what would it be? If your answer was “use landing pages to convert new leads” I’d have to agree with you — here’s why.

Nearly 1 in 10 people who make it to a landing page will become potential customers or leads. If you’re new to the world of converting web traffic, that number might not seem impressive, but when you do the math, there’s reason to believe that 1,000 people could become leads on your landing page if 10,000 people visit it.

That’s a lot of leads for most small-to-medium-sized businesses. Let’s look at exactly what a landing page is and how having one (or more) can help you see results like this.

Generating leads for your business is a necessary part of your marketing campaign, and there are several ways to do it: through social media, content marketing, paid ads — the list goes on. With each digital campaign you run — no matter what channel you use — the people you’re targeting won’t convert themselves into potential customers. To do that, you’ll need a quality landing page that’s built specifically to convert those visitors. If you don’t have at least a few landing pages on your website, you’re missing out on opportunities to turn these individuals into paying customers down the line.

Today, we’ll explore the myriad of benefits that come with landing pages and how you might use one to reach your business goals.

Types of Landing Page Offers

Landing pages have a sole purpose: to convert leads for your business. However, you can target those leads using a specific content offer on each landing page.

Here are the types of content offers you can add to a landing page to convert visitors into leads:

1. Ebooks and Whitepapers

If you’ve written a blog post that introduces a topic your audience wants to learn about, you can satisfy their interest in that topic by elaborating on the subject in an ebook or whitepaper. Using a landing page, you can “gate” this resource behind a lead-capture form. Once your visitors complete the form, they’ll be able to access the content.

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2. Email Newsletter Subscription

Let’s say you write a lot of blog content on a similar topic. Sure, you can develop an ebook or whitepaper that elaborates on specific details, but you can also offer your readers an email newsletter they can subscribe to for the latest content on that topic. On various blog posts, use a call-to-action (CTA) to invite readers to subscribe to your blog. This CTA can link to a separate landing page where they can sign up for your email list.

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3. Online Course Enrollment

Whether you’re in the education industry or you offer various skill-based certifications to your audience, online courses should have their own landing pages, too. Using these pages, you can invite new students to sign up for a class you offer. This type of content adds value to the client’s experience — they’ll have more access to you through a private channel like email to discuss the course content and get feedback on their progress.

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4. Event Registration

Similar to online courses, events require you to collect information on your audience so they can receive updates leading up to the occasion. An event, as well as its various sessions and keynotes, can have its own individual landing pages to turn interested prospects into event attendees and leads.

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5. Free Trial

Are you offering a free demo of your product? Your demo offering could use its own landing page. Bring users to a page where they can sign up for a free trial of your software using their name, email address, job title, and any other information you deem necessary to give them the best customer experience.

Don’t forget to follow up with these leads — they’ve already demonstrated an interest in what you sell based on your landing page, so make sure your sales team closes the deal.

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6. Community Membership

If your business thrives on building community among customers — perhaps you should have a website dedicated to dialogue between users. You can do this by creating a landing page that lets website visitors sign up to become a bigger part of your business. There’s no harm in making it invitation-only either — in fact, it’s a great way to try your hand at relationship marketing to close these deals.

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7. App Download

Developing a mobile app for your product doesn’t just improve your customer experience — it also gives your business another avenue to capture leads. A lead-optimized landing page that invites users to download an app is quite common. On the analytics side, you can use both Google Analytics to capture insights about who is visiting the landing page and downloading the app, then use that data to make your landing page even more effective.

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The Benefits of a Landing Page

The benefits of building a landing page for each of your marketing campaigns or content offers are endless. In this section, we dive into detail about seven factors that make this lead generation tool indispensable.

1. Landing pages aim to increase conversions.

Having a targeted page that directly ties back to an offer or next step is critical to providing value upfront. This can also encourage new site visitors to provide their information in exchange for an immediate, tangible reward.

For instance, let’s say you’ve landed on a business’s website and you’re immediately greeted with a pop-up form asking for your name and email. That’s a bit jarring before you even know what the company is about, isn’t it?

Alternatively, imagine you’ve found a business’s free ebook on social media, which outlines ten immediate solutions to your problem. I’m willing to bet you’re more likely to provide your name and email for that valuable content, right?

Many companies send their advertising, email, or social media traffic to their homepage. This is a huge missed opportunity. When you know a stream of targeted traffic will be coming to your website, you can increase the likelihood of converting that traffic into leads by using a targeted landing page.

For instance, those users who convert on your social media ebook landing page are clearly interested in social media. To further nurture those leads, you might follow up with a personalized email, detailing additional content you can provide related to social media.

2. Landing pages can provide additional insights into your target audience.

By creating various landing pages with segmented offers, you can track which topics convert at the highest rate. This can give you valuable insights into your audience’s interests.

You could use the data you collect from your landing pages to create a more targeted, personalized marketing strategy. Plus, landing pages don’t just tell you which content your audience likes best — they also tell you which channels your leads prefer. This can enable your marketing team to refine the strategy further, promoting content and engaging with your audience on the channel(s) they’re already using.

For example, let’s say you notice your landing pages related to ecommerce perform exceptionally well, and most of those users find your landing page from your paid ads on Facebook and LinkedIn. This information can help you target future campaigns primarily towards your social audience. You would also have a basis for incorporating additional ecommerce content into your marketing strategy as a whole.

3. Landing pages can grow your email subscriber list.

In exchange for the content offered on your landing page, you’ll typically ask users to provide their email and name. This can help you quickly grow your email subscriber list, and segment that list to provide more personalized follow-up emails.

People who’ve filled out a form in exchange for content or information on your product or service have shown an interest in what you have to offer. This ensures your subscriber list is filled with potentially high-quality leads.

Consider how you might further nurture them by sending a “Thank you” email after they download your landing page offer, with additional resources related to the content in which they’ve shown interest.

4. Landing pages are testable.

A landing page is a fantastic opportunity to get creative and test out various designs to determine which visuals and copy perform best with your target audience. Additionally, it’s often lower risk to test out a new landing page, rather than making major design changes to your entire blog or website infrastructure.

For instance, AJ Beltis, HubSpot’s Content & Acquisition Manager, told me, “If you’re using a content management system with a built-in A/B testing tool (like HubSpot), you can easily set up and run a test to see which copy, design, imagery, and page elements yield a stronger conversion rate. This means you can quickly uncover new ways to drive more leads and contacts for your business.”

5. Landing pages allow you to measure metrics directly tied to business goals.

If you’ve created a specific landing page to market your new product or service, you can then use that landing page to measure metrics directly tied to your business goals.

For instance, let’s say your marketing team is tasked with increasing sales for your new email tool. To accomplish this, your team creates a campaign with a landing page offering a free demo of your tool.

You might measure conversion metrics on that landing page to determine how well your campaign is performing, or whether you need to make tweaks to communicate the true value of your new product. Additionally, you can measure which sites drive the highest conversions to your landing page, and put more resources into marketing your email tool on those sites — or social media apps — in particular.

6. Landing pages add context to your offer.

AJ Beltis told me one of the biggest benefits of a landing page is the opportunity to add context to your marketing offer. “Marketers feel motivated to bypass the landing page process and skip right to the conversion by encouraging form fills in other methods, such as through a chatbot,” Beltis told me.

Beltis adds, “However, this process eliminates the opportunity to add more context to what it is you’re offering. Imagery and essential information that can only be shared with a landing page provide content to those who need it before they decide to convert.”

7. Landing pages increase brand value and help make a good first impression.

Ultimately, a sleek, well-designed landing page can impress new visitors and turn them into leads by demonstrating the valuable content your company can deliver. A landing page is space you can use to tell your visitors what you’re offering, and how it can positively impact them. Even if a viewer doesn’t immediately convert, a well-designed landing page can increase brand recognition and help nurture leads for future sales.

For instance, take a look at this impressive landing page created by Talisker, a whisky brand. Using Ceros’ landing page product to design an immersive experience, Talisker is demonstrating brand value and, ideally, making a fantastic first impression on new visitors.

This is proof that a landing page doesn’t have to be boring — in fact, it shouldn’t be. Take the time to create an engaging, interactive, interesting landing page that communicates the value of your brand.

Best Practices for Creating a Landing Page

1. Find a landing page builder.

To create a landing page, you’ll want to start by exploring landing page builders — unless, of course, you’re using a content management system that already provides landing page templates, like HubSpot. Look for a landing page builder that is intuitive and simple to use, this way you’ll have a shorter learning curve and will be able to produce landing pages quickly. I recommend drag-and-drop style builders — they’re awesome for speeding up your workflow.

2. Use landing page templates.

Once you’ve determined the right software to build your landing page, get inspired with some landing page templates. You might also use this as an opportunity to take AJ’s advice above and A/B test two different designs to explore which design elements result in the highest conversions.

3. Communicate value.

Additionally, it’s critical any landing page you design effectively communicates the value you’re providing visitors in exchange for contact information. And, of course, you’ll want to include a form that visitors will fill out in exchange for the offer you’re promoting on your landing page.

To learn more about how to create a landing page in detail, take a look at How to Create a Landing Page: The Simple Step-by-Step Guide.

What makes a landing page effective?

Here’s the thing, a good landing page is the equivalent of a baseball mitt — it catches the traffic that your marketing campaign pitches to the audience. This means that the landing page you create should be specific to the type of traffic that it’ll be catching. For example, if your marketing campaign features an ebook, your landing page should also mention the ebook. It’ll be even better if the ebook is the only content offer mentioned on the landing page. This ensures people won’t become confused about what they’re going to receive when they share their contact information.

Because the landing page is targeting only the people who are (presumably) interested in this ebook, and because this ebook has exclusive information that elaborates on a topic your audience cares about, you can convert a higher percentage of your website visitors into leads, whom you can then follow up with using a lead nurture campaign.

Ready to create your first landing page, or improve on a landing page you already have? Here are some of the most important elements you’ll want to implement to ensure your landing page is moving your business closer to its goals:

1. Intuitive Navigation

You’ve brought your targeted traffic to a page where they can take your desired action. Don’t distract them! Limit the number of exits from your landing page so that your visitors are focused on filling out your form. A key part of this is to remove the website navigation elements on landing pages. This helps put the focus back on the content you’re offering.

See how the landing page below does this — aside from the HubSpot logo, there are no navigation buttons to confuse or distract visitors.

2. Sharing Options

Tap into the largest community of your best (and free) marketers: your audience. Add share links to your landing page to encourage your website visitors to share your content with their audiences.

3. Valuable Content Offers

First and foremost, if you have a valuable offer, your visitors will give up their contact information in exchange for your offer. Ask yourself whether your offer is compelling to your audience and make sure your landing page demonstrates that value.

One way to ensure your landing page adds value is to show your audience the content they’re going to receive — directly on the page. See how this can look in the example landing page below.

4. Succinct Copy and Lead Forms

The longer your landing page and form, the more friction you add to the lead-generation process. Keeping your lead form short and straightforward will increase your conversion rate.

Here’s a tip: Put as many contact fields as you can on the same line. Shortening the height of your lead-capture form helps you limit the more trivial fields you might be tempted to include, and prevents your landing page visitors from getting spooked by a form that’s asking too much of them. As shown below, sometimes all you need is a first and last name, followed by an email address.

5. Focused Communication

You might be tempted to create a catch-all landing page that mentions your online course, email newsletter, ebook, and every other content offer you’re promoting. However, this is not ideal.

The people who visit your landing page should be looking for one particular offer and this offer should match the communication they saw right before they clicked your landing page link. Did you share a social media post about your latest free email template? If so, that’s exactly what your landing page should communicate. Use the headline to grab the reader’s attention and let them know “Hey! You’re in the right place to download that free email template.” The imagery of the template and a few bullet points about the benefits of it will help communicate this point, too.

6. Tracking and Analytics

It’s one thing to know how many visits your landing page received. It’s another to know where those visitors came from.

You’ll need to know this information so that you can optimize your marketing campaign to generate more leads. If email marketing is generating more clicks to your landing page than the search engines, then it’s a good idea to focus on email marketing tactics while you optimize your landing page for the search engines.

UTM tracking parameters can help you uncover these insights, too. You can use tools like Google Analytics, Bit.ly, and HubSpot to create and track UTM parameters. Here’s a detailed guide on how to start using this tool.

7. Constant Improvement

As many best practices as you may read about online, your landing page can always use more testing and improvement. Make sure you have a landing page creation tool that allows you to create and test many different landing pages to see what works best for your business. Additionally, if you’re a HubSpot customer, consider some of the landing page tool integrations, such as briX.

Gotta Catch ’em All

You’ve spent weeks, months, or even an entire quarter developing the perfect marketing campaign and content offers to appeal to your buyer personas. Don’t let that hard work go to waste — remember, converting visitors to leads is your main goal. Building quality landing pages for each campaign or offer you create will be an important part of your lead generation strategy. Use the best practices in this article to build the perfect landing pages for your business and capture every lead you can.

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