Category Archives: B2B

Your website inspiration journey starts here. 

Deciding to create a web presence is a big decision, but the best websites are a culmination of many small decisions. Choosing the right content management system and web host, opting for a template, refining your content, and selecting the best layouts to display your products and services are just a few of the details that establish your business’s online identity.

But one major decision that takes time, diligence, and a great deal of inspiration is the design of your website.

In this article, we’re sharing a few dozen of the best website designs we’ve seen. From familiar corporations to small businesses, to international organizations, these sites push the status quo on the web. Whether it’s the design aesthetic, usability, interactivity, sound design, or value that the site provides, each one is a masterpiece in its respective industry and something to aspire to.

Not surprisingly, many organizations exist to highlight these sites and the contributions they make to the web. To help surface some of the most inspirational designs, I gathered several award-winners that have made their way through several key awards organizations — including Red Dot, Awwwards, UX Awards, The Webby Awards, SiteInspire, Best Website Gallery, and FWA.

Click the links below to jump to explore website designs that crushed it in the last several years. We’ve also included a bonus section of designs that are just plain cool — so check them out, too!

• Best Website Designs from 2014 – 2015
• Best Website Designs from 2016
• Best Website Designs from 2017
• Best Website Designs from 2018
• Best Website Designs from 2019
• Best Website Designs from 2020
• Today’s Cool Website Designs 
• Website Design Ideas

As you browse through the list, know that each site excels in its own way and seeks to serve a unique purpose. While one site may be an excellent example of visual design, another may be an excellent example of interactivity. 

This means that not all of these sites may be “conversion machines” or blueprint ideas that you can easily copy over to your site. Rather, they’re great ways to gain some website design inspiration and see the cutting-edge marketing that’s happening in the different corners of the web.

Keep in mind that web designs are fluid and change often. Some of the designs in this list have changed since they were awarded, but we do our best to keep them up-to-date. We’re confident you’ll find a design here that sparks your creativity.

Beautiful Award-Winning Websites

And the awards go to …

Best Website Designs from 2014 – 2015

1. Virgin America

Award: Most Significant Industry Evolution, 2014 UX Awards

In a world where airline websites are known to be riddled with major usability issues, Virgin America has one of the best websites that pushes usability, accessibility, and responsive design forward. 

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2. Feed

Award: Site of the Day (6/6/2015), Awwwards

Not only is Feed an interesting concept, but it also has a stunning execution that challenges our understanding of what is possible on the web. Through a creative blend of animation and video, the site immerses the user in an engaging experience. As an atypical site, it contains several unique usability elements, including navigation that doubles as a scroll progress bar.

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3. ETQ

Award: Site of the Day (5/19/2015), Awwwards

ETQ takes a minimalistic approach to ecommerce with a stripped-down site. Big, compelling visuals of their product lay against simple, flat backgrounds accompanied by strong typography that keeps the focus on exactly what the user came there to see: shoes.

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4. Mikiya Kobayashi

Award: Site of the Day (7/4/2015), Awwwards

Mikiya is a Product Designer with a minimalistic portfolio that showcases his work through strong photography and subtle animations. His full site was originally created in Japanese and then translated into English, helping demonstrate the international scalability of his design.

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5. Woven Magazine

Award: Site of the Day (4/4/2015), Best Website Gallery

Woven is an online publication that celebrates artists, crafters, and creators alike. They confirm that publications can (and should) have beautiful, engaging sites with easy-to-read content. Free of distractions like pop-ups and intrusive ads, this site is all about the experience of the content itself.

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6. JOHO’s Bean

Award: FWA of the Day (8/7/2015), Favorite Website Awards

The website for JOHO’s Bean has incredible imagery, interactivity, storytelling, visual design, and most of all, sound engineering. These all come together to create a compelling, emotional, and engaging site that tells the story of a coffee bean’s journey.

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7. World of SWISS

Award: Best User Interface, 2015 Webby Awards

Another airline? Yep. SWISS airlines built an incredibly immersive site that tells the story of what it’s like to fly with them — and they did too great of a job to be ignored. Strong visuals and animations introduce the user to different sections of the site that are packed with information beyond the usual sales and marketing pitch.

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Best Website Designs from 2016

8. Rainforest Guardians

Award: Best Activism Website, 2016 Webby Awards

Rainforest Guardians became one of the most immersive nonprofit websites of 2016. Seeking to build awareness around deforestation, the site allows users to “visit” the various villages, natives, and waterways that make up the Amazon Rainforest. The site puts interactivity at the center of its user experience — a wise choice if your goal is to get people to connect with your cause and convert into volunteers.

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9. Protest Sportswear

Award: Site of the Year (2016), Awwwards

The Awwwards calls Protest Sportswear a “shoppable lookbook,” and that’s exactly what this site is. As a clothing outfitter, this company has reinvented the way they market their product: Rather than promoting garments of clothing, Protest Sportswear promotes “looks.” This makes the company’s product the most appealing part of the website itself, using a collage of styles to design a homepage that changes as often as its customer’s styles do.

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10. The Teacher’s Guild

Award: Best Association Website, 2016 Webby Awards

The Teacher’s Guild is a professional community of educators that addresses some of the most critical challenges in education. What makes this website award-winning is how it balances diverse content types — programs, solutions, approaches, and collaborations — without overwhelming visitors. Not only are the background visuals prominently placed, but they also use white space to emphasize the written calls to action at the center, as shown in the screenshot below.

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Best Website Designs from 2017

11. Simply Chocolate

Award: Site of the Year (2017), Awwwards

You’ll get a craving for chocolate just looking at this website — and in a way, that’s Simply Chocolate‘s website working as designed.

This appetizing website is that of a Denmark chocolate maker Simply Chocolate. Its website uses a variety of colors (and creative product names) to promote each chocolate bar. And as you scroll from one product to the next, they all seem to remain consistent in brand. The three-dimensional appearance of each chocolate bar makes you feel like you can grab it off of your computer screen, while the “Add to Box” CTA to the top-left is ideally placed for users to select the products they want while browsing.

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12. NOWNESS

Award: Best Cultural Blog/Website, 2017 Webby Awards

NOWNESS is perhaps the coolest crowdsourced video blog on the internet. That was a mouthful…what does it all mean?

NOWNESS‘s “crowdsourced” nature is part of what makes it an award-winner. This means most of its content comes from independent creatives — an increasingly popular way for businesses to publish content. NOWNESS is also a video blog, meaning all of its blog content is in video format. Together, these qualities help make Nowness a captivating hub for the stories that brands everywhere strive to tell.

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Best Website Designs from 2018

13. crypton.trading

Award: Site of the Day (4/3/2018), Awwwards

Meet crypton.trading, your robot accountant.

Crypton.trading is a trading hub for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, using artificial intelligence to predict changes in a currency’s value and identify key buying and selling opportunities. The website was rated high for its development and design, as it gradually explains more of the developer’s methods the further down visitors scroll.

This award-winning website makes tech-savvy visitors feel right at home the moment Crypton’s greeting appears across the homepage, one letter at a time.

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14. Southwest: Heart of Travel

Award: Best Visual Design – Aesthetic, 2018 Webby Awards

When Southwest Airlines wanted to prove that its customers were “more than just a dollar sign,” the company created a website where the design was assembled using the shapes of their customers’ flight paths.

The website, called Heart of Travel, even allows visitors to create their own artwork out of a trip they might plan on taking. In this way, Southwest’s website is a product of their most loyal passengers.

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15. Reductress

Award: Best Humor Website, 2018 Webby Awards

It’s not that hard to make someone laugh on the internet — so much of what we read and consume online is meant to be entertaining. But it is hard to do it consistently for a large audience. Reductress is a satirical magazine whose headlines and general reading experience are top-tier in the humor department — making the website itself a quality property.

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16. Overflow

Award: Site of the Day (3/20/2018), Best Website Gallery

Overflow is a design tool that allows people and businesses to create story-like flow diagrams of their ideas so they’re easier for others to understand. Aside from this being just a good service, the Overflow website practices what it preaches: Along with vibrant red call-to-action buttons for downloading the tool, this website promotes its product the best way it knows how — using a flow diagram.

The website delivers this flow diagram in the form of a video. While embedded videos can look rather clunky sitting in the middle of a website’s other design elements, Overflow’s is perfectly placed and exactly what you’d want to see when landing on the site for the first time.

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17. Frans Hals Museum

Award: Site of the Year (2018), Awwwards

It can be tough for a museum to present all of its artwork together on a cohesive website. That’s what makes the website of the Frans Hals Museum so impressive.

Located in the Netherlands, this museum has created a website that uses a combination of digital design elements and its own exhibits. This mixture helps visitors understand what they’ll see, when they can see it, and where else they can get a taste of what this museum has to offer.

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Best Website Designs from 2019

18. 1917: In the Trenches

Award: Awwwards’ Best Website of the Day (2019)

This website, made to promote the film 1917, allows you to walk around the trenches and perform the same mission that the characters did in the film. You can also see their maps or access other tools. 

This is a great example of a site that went above and beyond with interactivity as well as a site that leverages its content and prewritten storyline to market its film. This website won Site of the Day by Awwwards, which allows designers to vote and nominate great websites they see daily.

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19. The Octopus: A design blog by IDEO

Award: Business Blog/Website 2019 Webby award

IDEO, a global design company, won the Business Blog/Website 2019 Webby award for its Octopus blog, and for good reason. The blog features a sleek, black-and-white Octopus drawing as its homepage design, and uses yellow, black, and white to create a cohesive theme as you scroll.

If you hover over a blog post, the title is highlighted in yellow. If you hover over an image, the image is pulled towards you — two small features that make a big difference in terms of creating a unique and engaging user experience. 

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20. Nomadic Tribe

Award: Awwwards’ Site of the Year nomination (2019)

This site, which was nominated for Awwards’ Site of the Year, is one of the more engaging sites I’ve seen. The homepage immediately begins playing a stunning video featuring a man walking across a desert, followed by gorgeous landscape scenes and text like, “Are you lucky enough to call yourself an adventurer?”

The text throughout the website is playful, with colorful pinks and oranges and yellows, and the homepage is logically designed, with CTAs placed throughout that range in commitment-level from “Read More” to “Watch Now” and, finally, “Download the App”. Ultimately, the website is beautifully designed with strong attention to detail, and tells a compelling story throughout.

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21. Diana Danieli

Award: Webby 2019

This 2019 Webby-winning site shows off imagery of art and architecture with either high contrast or heavy exposure. As a website visitor, you can click and drag your mouse to change the photos and variations. Each image shows a piece of work that highlights the artist who owns the website.

A cool plus about this website is its incorporation of audio and music. Clicking on certain buttons on the screenplays a piano note and truly immerses you in the Diana Danieli experience.

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22. George Nakashima Woodworkers

Award: Webby 2019

This woodworking website emphasizes nature and care for the woodworking trade. It’s essentially a slideshow of beautiful forestry and farming images. As a new image comes on the screen, a new quote related to wood or trees also comes up. This is incredibly relaxing to the visitor and shows that the woodworkers recognize the beauty of trees and the environment. This website also won a Webbie in 2019. 

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Best Website Designs from 2020

23. Swab the World

Award: Site of the Day (2020), Awwwards

Parallax, bold colors, and negative space shape the design and experience of Swab the World’s website. The organization brings awareness to stem cell donations. Their mission is to “Make sure every single patient finds their match. Period.” Photos of couples exhibiting love and emotions bring a human element to a historically complex and scientific process. 

From a technical perspective, the design makes moving down the page feel natural, ensuring the readers reach each point of copy and every CTA on the homepage.

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24. Newest Americans

Award: Honorable Mention (2020), Awwwards

An organization with a responsibility as large as honoring past, present, and future migrating identities needs a beautiful and functional website to help spread the word. Newest Americans champions immigrant experiences in cities across the state of New Jersey. The website uses beautiful imagery of people, places, and items that represent this experience in a way that flows cohesively down the homepage, telling the story of this group of America’s newest citizens. 

The website is both visually appealing and functional with a simple navigation menu, stories organized by photos, and a clean press page that puts the most recent articles front and center.

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25. Spotify Design

Award: Honorable Mention (2020), Awwwards

Spotify is known for accomplishing its fair share of amazing feats, and its latest iteration of Spotify.Design is no different. Serving as the hub for all things visual and creative for Spotify, the music and podcast giant gives listeners a look into the who, what, why, and how of what makes the app so sensational.

Bright colors, drop shadows, and smooth animations give this website character and depth. The flat geometric designs with abstract accents make albums and artists practically jump off of the screen.

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26. Andy Warhol

Award: Honorable Mention (2020), Awwwards

Artist, film director, and producer Andy Warhol’s life will forever be encapsulated in a splendidly designed website that captures his art style in a digital format. As you peruse the page, your cursor becomes a spotlight that converts every image you hover over into a negative image or inverses the colors of the text you’re reading. 

The big, bold text makes a statement and emphasizes just how important copy is to website design. Subtle animations help pace the site and set the tone for each section as you peruse the home page.

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27. Human Interaction Company

Award: Corporate Website (2020), Red Dot

To see video done right on a website, look no further than the Human Interaction Company. From the moment you click on the site, the experience is lightning fast. You’re dropped directly into the action — the why, what, and how of Human Interaction and exactly what the team does.

This Red Dot Design Award winner aims to bring the study of human interaction to the masses, and in the process, show us just how engaging it can be to learn about it. Don’t get discouraged by their award status though — none of the photos on this site are photoshopped, so it’s a practical example of building quality with the resources you have available.

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28. Garoa Skincare

Award: Site of the Day (2020), Awwwards

How do you transform the feeling of luxury and practicality into a website? Garoa Skincare provides a blueprint. Whether your product costs half the price of your closest competitor or twice the price, your site can bring a sense of extravagance to just about any product you sell.

High-quality visuals, typefaces that complement each other, and a balance of negative space with useful copy can bring a simplistic elegance to your website.

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Other Cool Website Designs

29. MovieMark

MovieMark is a growth marketing agency and HubSpot Partner whose website is all about digital storytelling. Located in Colombia, the agency makes video a core focus of its brand, so it’s only fitting that MovieMark‘s website follows this theme.

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30. Guillaume Tomasi

As a Photographer in Montreal, Guillaume Tomasi has built a portfolio that’s truly fit to house his unique and awe-inspiring photography. His surreal photo style is juxtaposed by his simple, flat, empty, and minimalistic portfolio design that places all of the focus on the work itself.

His unique series navigation coupled with art-gallery-inspired work introductions and perfect scrolling interactions yield an experience reminiscent of that of a real gallery.

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31. The District

This branding agency takes its imagery seriously, and it should — it handles all channels of media for its clients. The District’s website alone is a journey through some of the most beautiful artwork and photography you’ve ever seen.

These provocative tiles change rapidly as you explore the website, and the wackier they seem, the more interested you become in learning about their past work.

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32. Tej Chauhan

Tej Chauhan has turned impressionist artwork into a business model with this intriguing website. Each image on this product developer’s homepage slides out to cover the previous image, offering little context around the object you now see in front of you. But it’s that lack of context that makes you want to learn more. 

Plus, the tagline, “Souvenirs of The Near Future,” suggests these objects are a part of their product line — and an opportunity for you to bring these innovative objects into your life.

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33. Amanda Martocchio Architecture

An architecture firm might not specialize in web development, but its website should still demonstrate its commitment to visually pleasing design. Amanda Martocchio took that to heart with this gorgeous website.

It’s no secret that Amanda Martocchio Architecture loves its work — each picture on the homepage of its website is an enchanting shot of the houses the company designs. The website labels every house you scroll through with the type of design that was intended, along with numerous angles to each building.

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Website Design Ideas

Now that you’ve seen a number of beautifully designed and award-winning platforms, keep these potential ideas in mind as you create your own.

• Consider ways that you can make your website interactive, like the 1917 example.
• Make a website that emphasizes the mobile experience, even while it still has a good UX on desktops.
• Create a website that tells a story about your brand with photos, text, or video. 
• If you can’t create a heavily interactive site, consider drawing in eyes with a site that presents a slideshow of your photos. 
• Ensure your call-to-actions are easy to see and encourage visitors to continue exploring your site 
• Keep navigation clean. Ensure your visitors always know how to get back to the homepage.
• Integrate your social media sites via social embed buttons, so site visitors can easily follow you on your various social channels. 
• Keep each of your web pages consistent in design — including font, colors, images, and messaging. 
• Test your website’s usability with a heat map, which will show you on which web pages your visitors are most likely to bounce. 
• Include a live chat or chatbot to give visitors the option to engage with you directly on your website if they prefer live chat to phone calls. Live chat can automate functions for your sales and service reps and create a better communication experience for the customer.
• Get an SSL certificate to ensure your website is secure. SSL is part of Google’s search ranking algorithm, so an SSL certificate can help you rank higher in search. 

Build a Beautiful Website for your Business

Designing a website can be simple once you have a look and feel in mind. Use these examples as a springboard to developing the layout, color palette, imagery, and animations on your website. Once you’re ready to start coding or dragging and dropping, you’ll have a beautiful website that your visitors will enjoy.

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

We’ve talked a lot about the customer journey — how it impacts sales, service, and marketers.

But one segment that feels a little different is the ecommerce customer journey. The customer journey is different from service based companies, because it can be much quicker (buying from Amazon or an Instagram ad).

However, if you work at an ecommerce company, it’s important to understand the customer journey: all the touch points and stages.

Below, let’s learn how to map your ecommerce company’s customer journey. Plus, you can download some templates to help you get started.

Touch points can include when someone sees a social media ad, when a friend tags them in a post online, when they come across your website, when they read a blog of yours, when your product shows up on Google, when they search on Amazon, etc.

The journey from when they first come in contact with you to when they purchase your product to if they reach out for a return is included in the ecommerce customer journey.

Writing down these touch points might make you realize that the journey on your website isn’t ideal. If that happens, you can look for solutions to help you, like WooCommerce (a WordPress plug in).

Now, let’s explore the various stages of the ecommerce journey.

1. Awareness

The first stage of the ecommerce customer journey is awareness. During this stage, a potential customer is experiencing a problem and is doing research to understand their problem.

During this stage, customers are researching the issue they’re having, seeing if it has solutions, overcoming misconceptions, and prioritizing solutions.

2. Consideration

In the consideration stage, potential customers are researching products and methods to solve their problem.

For example, let’s say that I want to start a morning routine. I do some research on Google and see a few ads on social media and realize I want a morning routine journal.

Now that I know what I want to buy and how to fix my problem, it’s time to research solutions. I’ll go to Google and Amazon and see what morning routine journals are available and which ones have the best reviews.

3. Decision

During this stage, potential customers are now narrowing down their list to the top products they want to buy.

This is when they’re learning what makes your product stand out from the competition, and why your product is the one they need. During this stage, it’s important to understand the various touch points so you can communicate what makes your product unique.

4. Retention

For ecommerce, I decided to add one more stage to the customer journey. That stage is retention. After a customer buys your product, their experience and decision to buy from you again relies solely on the quality of your product and customer service.

Let’s say the package was missing, delivered to the wrong address, or they want to return the product. If that experience doesn’t go well, they won’t buy from you again. If it does go well, they’ll probably consider leaving a positive review.

Additionally, during the retention stage is when you can consider retargeting marketing and social media ads so more of your products show up for them online.

Once you’ve delighted your customers, they start to see you show up online, and want to engage with you, they’ll buy from you again and again.

To learn more about ecommerce marketing, you can check out HubSpot Academy’s free ecommerce marketing course.

Now that we understand the ecommerce customer journey, let’s visualize it with a customer journey map.

Essentially, this map will be a visualization of the start-to-finish customer journey. The point of creating this map is to not only understand the customer journey, but also to plan how you’re going to improve the customer experience at every touch point.

For example, HubSpot customer, CODE41, was able to optimize their ecommerce customer journey through HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and Service Hub.

With Marketing Hub, CODE41 sends millions of emails (yes, millions) to their lists. With Sales Hub, they have the customer support team automate reminders to minimize the customer support failures: not following up on client requests, not forgetting to check payment status, etc.

Lastly, the company uses Service Hub to generate reports for how many tickets they have that were returned, complaints, repairs, etc. This helps them improve their customer experience and retention in the process.

If you want to get started with your own ecommerce customer journey map, you can use HubSpot’s customer journey map template, where you’ll brainstorm what the customer is thinking or feeling, what their actions are, what they’re researching, and how they go from consideration to decision.

For more information, you can check out this post on customer journey thinking, and watch the video below to learn more:

Now, you might be wondering, “How do I create an ecommerce customer journey map?”

Well, first you’ll create your buyer personas, and then envision what your ideal customer goes through when they’re seeking your product.

Once you do that, take HubSpot’s ecommerce marketing course, and download our templates, then you can just fill out the template and brainstorm how to improve the journey at every touch point.

Ecommerce customer journey mapping is an essential part of understanding your target audience and improving the customer experience. Focusing on providing the best customer experience will help retain customers and drive more leads and sales.

For your team’s marketing efforts to be effective, you need to know which marketing channels and touchpoints are resonating with your audience most — you must understand which channels and touchpoints are so successful at whatever it is they do that they make leads want to convert.

Last click attribution can help you with this — it assists in identifying which marketing touchpoint prompted a conversion in the final part of the buyer’s journey.

Last Click Attribution Model

In this blog post, we’ll cover all things last click attribution including how it’s defined, what makes it unique, how your marketing team can use it, and more.

Pros and Cons of Last Click Attribution

Last click attribution is helpful if you want to know which of your marketing channels and touchpoints have the most influence in the final stage of the buyer’s journey.

While this is helpful information, it doesn’t account for the numerous other channels and touchpoints that impacted a customer from the very start of the buyer’s journey. This is important to note since there are a variety of touchpoints, across numerous channels, that impact a lead throughout the buyer’s journey — which is why most marketers today refrain from only using last click attribution. Rather, they’ll use multi-touch attribution or include last-click as part of their other marketing attribution efforts.

For instance, say a lead received an email from your email campaign, clicked through to your website, read a blog post, and then decided they wanted to buy your product. Well, last click attribution would only account for that last touchpoint — the blog post. Meanwhile, the other touchpoints throughout the buyer’s journey that contributed to this lead’s decision are dismissed.

That’s why multi-touch attribution has become such a popular attribution model among today’s marketers. Multi-touch attribution accounts for all of these touchpoints and channels and assigns them credit based on their influence.

In addition to last click and multi-touch attribution, you may have heard of first click attribution.

First Click vs. Last Click Attribution

FIrst click attribution differs from last click attribution because it assigns all of the credit for a conversion to the first touchpoint or channel (e.g. interaction on your website or with a marketing campaign) that a customer had before a conversion.

First click attribution is helpful if you want to know which of your marketing efforts are generating initial traffic in the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey.

Similar to last click attribution, this is a helpful attribution method on a small scale — combining it with other attribution methods is recommended in order to get a clear picture of your marketing attribution efforts.

Now, let’s talk about how your marketing team can use last click attribution.

How to Create a Last Click Attribution Report

If you choose to create a standalone last click attribution report, you’ll likely find yourself using an attribution tool.

If you already use an attribution tool, there’s a chance it has a specific report that focuses solely on the last click. There’s also a chance that it offers customizable attribution reports which would also allow you to create a last click report.

Either way, here are a few available options for your consideration as you look to create marketing attribution reports of your own.

1. HubSpot Ads Attribution

HubSpot Ads Software offers five attribution models — you can filter your ad campaigns by attribution report to determine how your ads influence contacts throughout buyer’s journey, all from within HubSpot.

If you create a custom multi-touch attribution report, you can hone in on last click/ last interaction data — you can also customize the group of contacts you want to report on, the status of your campaign (“active,” “paused,” or “deleted), and the date range.

Get HubSpot’s Ads Software to use CRM data to create personalized and targeted ad campaigns, and report on the ads that are converting prospects.

2. Google Ads Attribution

Google Ads Attribution gives insight into cross-channel attribution so you have a solid understanding of how your Google Ads perform among your audience — this insight allows you to improve all marketing interactions and touchpoints throughout the buyer’s journey.

Google Ads offers six attribution models, one of which is last click — it gives all of the credit for a conversion to the last event/ last-clicked Google ad and its corresponding keyword.

3. Facebook Attribution

Facebook Attribution gives you a complete look at how prospects and customers are interacting with your business throughout the buyer’s journey via Facebook (including the final stage of the buyer’s journey, when the last click occurs).

Facebook manages giving all of the credit for a conversion to the last click for you — no impressions or earlier touchpoints are credited. If a click occurs within 60 seconds of a visit, Facebook will credit the click.

Get Started With Last Click Attribution

Last click is a great addition to your attribution strategy. By determining what the last customer touchpoint in the buyer’s journey is prior to a conversion, you’re able to understand which interactions and content are likely to heavily influence your customers.

Imagine someone searches for a topic and finds your website on page one of Google. When they click through to your website, though, their eyes land on a bland webpage that says “Service Unavailable”.

What do you think they’ll do when they find your website on Google again? Odds are, they’ll skip over it and click on the next link. If visitors are looking for answers and you’re promising them those answers, but you can’t deliver because something’s wrong with your website, they’ll lose trust in your brand.

Unfortunately, if your website experiences a 503 Service Unavailable Error, there’s no silver bullet solution. You have to investigate what’s actually causing the issue, because even though these types of errors indicate what happened to your website, they don’t tell you why it happened.

To help you fix your 503 Service Unavailable Error and avoid losing potential customers, check out our guide on what exactly the issue is and its most common solutions.

When your website is experiencing a 503 Service Unavailable Error, your site’s visitors will land on an error page. Fortunately, there are five common solutions for troubleshooting most 503 Service Unavailable Errors.

1. Restart your server.

Sometimes, there will be congestion in the server chain that hosts your website. One of the most effective ways to open up and refresh it is to simply restart your web server. If your website is hosted on multiple servers, make sure you restart all of them to get it running again.

2. Check to see if your web server is going through maintenance.

Most web servers shut down when they’re going through maintenance. If you can access your server’s administration settings, check the configuration options to see when automatic maintenance sessions are scheduled. If you’d rather have complete control over your server’s maintenance, you can disable these automatic updates in the configuration options, too.

3. Fix faulty firewall configurations.

Your firewall is your website’s gatekeeper, protecting your site from malicious visitors or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Sometimes, a faulty firewall configuration will cause your firewall to deem requests from a content delivery network as an attack on your server and reject them, resulting in a 503 Service Unavailable Error. Check your firewall configuration to pinpoint and fix the issue.

4. Sift through your server-side logs.

There are two types of server-side logs — applications logs and server logs. Application logs recount your website’s entire history, letting you see the web pages requested by visitors and the servers it connected to. Server logs provide information about the hardware running your server, revealing details about its health and status. Sift through both types of server-side logs to uncover any alarming information about your server or website.

5. Comb through your website’s code to find bugs.

If there’s a mistake in your website’s code, your web server might not be able to correctly answer requests from a content delivery network. Comb through your code to find bugs or copy your code into a development machine. It’ll perform a thorough debug process that will simulate the exact situation your 503 Service Unavailable Error occurred in and allow you to find the exact moment things went wrong.

Any time there’s an error on your site, it’s important to fix it as soon as you can. If customers get errors, they probably won’t come back to your page.

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

Imagine this: You run a successful online store and have a sleek app that makes shopping a breeze.

Most of your sales come from paid ads on Facebook and Instagram, and your usual process involves retargeting customers who open your app but leave without purchasing anything.

The more app installs you get, the more sales you log. This process is seamless because you’re able to track user activity across apps and optimize your ad spend as you see what works and what doesn’t.

But, with this week’s release of IOS14.5, the data you collect from Apple mobile devices will change. Here’s how.

Apple’s New Privacy Policy

Apple has confirmed that along with the launch of iOS14.5, there is also a change coming to Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) Framework, which is essentially its data sharing and privacy policies.

Apple will now require that all mobile app advertisers gain opt-in from users to track their web and app activity.

While this provides consumers with the ultimate privacy, security, and control over the ads they see across their web and mobile devices, it’s expected that not all users will accept this prompt to opt-in. This could make it more difficult for businesses to reach their target audience, and deliver relevant ads.

From now on, whenever an Apple user downloads your app, they’ll be shown a prompt, asking if it’s okay for the app to track them. Additionally, with limited app user data, companies like Google report that ads could show poorer performance and returns than before the change.

While Apple’s pivot might seem shocking, it is not the first major tech giant to take action when it comes to data privacy. Just in the last year, Google, another major player in the advertising world, announced that it will phase out third-party cookies on Chrome and will be offering replacement tracking tools, such as its Privacy Sandbox, after 2022. You can read more about that news here.

What will happen to Apple’s IDFA (Identification for Advertisers)?

To better understand what’s happening with Apple’s new update, let’s take a moment to learn about Apple’s identifier for advertisers (also known as IDFA). IDFA is tied to each Apple device and is used by advertisers to identify users.

Typically, the IDFA code is visible to advertisers, and it enables them to retarget consumers. Now, it will only be provided to advertisers if users give them the go-ahead and permission to track their usage across apps.

To prepare app owners, Apple has laid out the instructions for gaining proper tracking permissions on its website:

“You must also include a purpose string in the system prompt that explains why you’d like to track the user. Unless you receive permission from the user to enable tracking, the device’s advertising identifier value will be all zeros and you may not track them,” Apple explains.

 

How this Affects MMPs (Mobile Measurement Partners)

Traditionally, MMPs have been able to pull data from mobile apps and serve up data such as installs, views, and ad clicks, in an organized and insightful fashion. They provide advertisers an understanding of where their consumers come from, and what the results of a mobile campaign are, within their platform. With the changes coming to ATT, their ability to have access to all this could be diminished.

However, some MMPs, like AppsFlyer, are leaning into Apple’s SKadNetwork to glean insights for their mobile advertisers.

The SKadNetwork is a secure way for MMPs and advertisers to understand app installs and campaigns, without connecting those installs to specific user identities. Apple coordinates this attribution, and while using the SKadNetwork is a good alternative, it does not take into account view-through attribution and only provides data 24 to 28 hours after the first launch.

The Early Response to Apple’s Privacy Pivot

As you can imagine, this new update has caused ripples across the mobile advertising ecosystem, and brands like Facebook have already responded.

“Apple’s policy will prohibit certain data collection and sharing unless people opt into tracking on iOS 14 devices via the prompt. As more people opt-out of tracking on iOS 14 devices, ad personalization and performance reporting will be limited for both app and web conversion events,” says a Facebook for Business statement.

Meanwhile, Google, which has also been taking on its own privacy initiatives, provided information for developers and advertisers about how the change will impact them while also reminding readers of the importance of user privacy:

“At Google, we’ve always put users and their privacy first. Transparency, choice and control form the bedrock of our commitment to users, and advertising is no different. We remain committed to preserving a vibrant and open app ecosystem where people can access a broad range of ad-supported content with confidence that their privacy and choices are respected,” the Google post explains. “That’s why we’ll continue to invest in privacy-preserving technology ― including aggregated and on-device solutions ― like what we’re developing for the web, along with ecosystem partners, in the Privacy Sandbox.”

Quick Tips for Navigating Apple’s Privacy Changes

While this change will likely impact your current ad campaigns, and the size of its impact is still somewhat uncertain, there are a few areas you can still lean into and optimize your content for the right audiences:

• Don’t forget about Android campaigns: the iOS 14.5 update only affects Apple devices and users, so you can still segment your audiences by Android users and target them.
• Turn to your website: Use your website’s tracking capabilities or analytics tools to understand where your visitors are coming from, and create audiences based on those visitors.
• Amp up organic efforts: take a closer look at your organic social media and content strategy. Then use that data to strengthen your brand.

While the times ahead are uncertain and may not seem as ideal for marketers and advertisers, the industry is likely to evolve and find ways to reach prospective customers. As Apple rolls out this update, we’ll be paying close attention to how advertisers respond and will continue to update this post in the future.

Disclaimer: This blog post is not legal advice for your company to use in complying with data privacy laws like the GDPR. Instead, it provides background information to help you better understand current privacy shifts. The tips provided are not the same as legal advice, where an attorney applies the law to your specific circumstances, so we insist that you consult an attorney if you’d like advice on your interpretation of this information or its accuracy.

In a nutshell, you may not rely on this as legal advice, or as a recommendation of any particular legal understanding.

For B2B sales and marketing teams, few metaphors are as powerful as the sales funnel.

It’s a near-supernatural, multi-layered vortex that pulls in leads from the wider world, then draws them down toward closing. At the top of the funnel (TOFU) are fresh new leads who are just discovering your offerings. In the middle of the funnel (MOFU) are leads who are interested to learn more. Finally, at the bottom of the funnel (BOFU) are those leads who are poised and ready to make a purchase.

Modeling your sales funnel so you can better target and nurture leads at each layer is critical to increasing your conversion rate. But for accurate modeling, you need a lot of reliable data. And one major opportunity for collecting that data lies in your social media tools.

The importance of social media in marketing is unquestionable. In fact, businesses that market on social media are 40% more likely to hit their sales goals. Plus, a whopping 95% of buyers purchase from sellers who provide content that addresses their concerns and questions at each sales funnel level — and, nowadays, a lot of that content is posted on social platforms.

But the question remains: How can you measure and analyze the true impact of social activity on your sales funnel?

Here, we’ll explore what social media data is, and how you can use that data to strengthen your B2B sales funnels.

What is social media data?

Social media data (or social analytics — the terms are interchangeable) includes any information gleaned from the activity of visitors, prospects, and leads on your social media channels. Any data you obtain when someone interacts with your profile or content on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or any other social media channel counts as social data.

Specific metrics can vary from platform to platform. However, the following social data points are common to all of them:

• Shares/reposts
• Likes
• Comments
• Mentions
• Impressions
• Conversions
• Clicks

Clicks can be the most revealing of all social data points. Many outside factors can determine what post a visitor might choose to comment on or share. Click metadata can tell you what types of content they would like to explore further.

Why is social media data important to B2B funnels?

You can’t analyze the efficiency of your B2B social media marketing efforts without raw data. With so many marketing activities and steps in the buyer’s journey taking place on social media, analytics without social data won’t yield many useful insights.

With social analytics, you can answer some crucial questions about whether your social media activities can help you meet your goals. Analytics help answer questions such as:

• Which social media platforms are generating the most leads?
• What kind of content is making our audience click, share, and convert the most?
• What are our top-converting posts?
• Are our audiences more interested in engaging with TOFU, MOFU, or BOFU content?

By analyzing the right social data, you can learn what is and isn’t working — and then tailor your social media marketing strategy accordingly.

How Social Media Data Impacts Your B2B Funnels

Many aspects of the marketing, sales, and product development processes feed into modeling your sales funnel. The goal is to create a funnel that effectively addresses your buyer’s needs and brings them closer to closing a sale. Within this process, there are two critical areas where social data analytics are especially beneficial.

1. Lead Enrichment

Lead enrichment involves supplementing, correcting, and normalizing your data on a lead. The goal is to establish a more in-depth, up-to-date, and accurate picture of who your leads are and what they want. You can automate lead enrichment by importing third-party data into your CRM. You can also accomplish the same outcome by conducting manual research and verification on leads.

Lead enrichment makes it easy to perform several associated functions that will improve your sales funnel’s efficiency. These are:

Lead Scoring

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How do you know which leads are eager to buy and which ones are just looking? The solution is to quantify their signs of interest, assign them a score, and rank them.

The process of lead enrichment ensures you aren’t missing essential information about your lead, such as whether they are a decision-maker at their company. Social data can provide evidence of their signs of interest, as shown through their social media page interactions.

Lead Segmentation

A lead with a low score isn’t necessarily one you should ignore. However, a low-scoring lead might need different levels of attention or types of content.

The same goes for leads showing the same level of interest. If they’re in different industries or countries, the same approach might not work on all of them.

Social data can enrich your lead profiles with these details. Then you can segment your leads into separate audience groups, which enables you to target each group with custom-made content to address each group’s top concerns.

Lead Nurturing

You move a lead from one level of your sales funnel to the next by nurturing them.

Lead nurturing is accomplished by providing leads with content that answers their questions, addresses their concerns, and builds interest in your offers. The more data you have on your leads, the more hints you have about creating content most likely to engage them.

Lead Attribution

It’s great when your latest lead steps up engagement within your sales funnel. But if you don’t know what motivated them to provide their contact information, download that ebook, or request pricing, you’re missing out. That kind of knowledge is vital to improving your sales processes.

Enriched leads and social data analytics strengthen your attribution models. Lead attribution gives you the best chance of finding out which content deserves credit for the conversion.

2. Perfecting Your Messaging

The second key area impacted by social data is your messaging. Ultimately, all of your content is just a form of communication between you and the buyer.

When your messaging is perfect, it strikes the right tone, and speaks to your lead’s most pressing concerns — while also entertaining and educating. That’s when you know you’re putting your best effort into closing the sale.

When your messaging falls short on these fronts, leads can lose interest and drift away.

So, how do you perfect your messaging? The two easiest ways are through personalizing your sales outreach, and creating more engaging content.

Personalize Sales Outreach

Social data can tell you what your leads are most interested in and which channels are best for reaching them. This information allows you to personalize your sales outreach.

Let’s look at how this works in practice. Say you have a lead who consistently likes your tweets about a specific function of your product.

From that small piece of data, you can create a personalized outreach. A Twitter DM might be a great way to make a “sales call” — and now you have an even better idea for a good conversation starter.

Create More Engaging Content

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Content that engages is critical to move leads toward conversions. But what content should you be making to engage more leads?

First, step back to take a broader view of what your social data is telling you. Measuring how and where your leads engage with your sales funnel allows you to create more engaging content at all levels.

Let’s say you’re doing well at moving leads through the MOFU and BOFU, but many of them seem to get stuck in the TOFU. The leads who spend the most time in the TOFU aren’t converting their way further through the funnel at high enough rates.

Through careful parsing of your social data, you discover that the leads that slowly escape the TOFU heavily engage with your video content. This data tells you that you probably want to have video as a more significant share of your TOFU content.

It’s true that collecting, organizing, and analyzing raw social data can be overwhelming at the outset, but having the right resources can take a lot of the difficulty out of this endeavor. Tools like Oktopost can help you automate and optimize your social data processes, making it easy to finetune your content at every level of the sales funnel.

By leveraging social data to create better B2B sales funnel models, you will reap the benefits of its true impact with higher engagement rates, more conversions, and better ROI.

In recent years, we’ve seen the power of video on the internet — Facebook alone gets eight billion average daily views, and YouTube’s video platform has enabled young teens to become national superstars (Justin Bieber, anyone?). Also, a Cisco report estimates that, by 2022, watching video will account for 82% of internet traffic. 

There are various channels for marketers to consider when sharing videos, like the above-mentioned YouTube and TikTok or Snapchat. There’s also Instagram TV (IGTV) which, launched in 2018, is different from Instagram Stories.

Additionally, IGTV is primarily meant for smartphones, as the videos are vertical, and users don’t need to rotate their devices to watch. If you’re interested in testing out the app for your own business or simply want to know which brands to follow on the app, you’re in luck — here, we’ve compiled all the tips and information you need to get started with IGTV.

There is also a standalone IGTV app that you can download from the app store. To get it, simply go to the App Store or Google Play, search for IGTV, and click Get or Install. 

IGTV Video Length

Anyone with an Instagram account can upload an IGTV video. 

Unlike Instagram Stories’ 15-second video limit, IGTV videos can be up to 15 minutes long when uploaded from a mobile device and 60 minutes when uploaded from the web. 

How To Make IGTV Videos

To upload and edit your IGTV video title and description, follow these steps:

1.Open the IGTV app and click on your profile icon. Then, click Upload Video. If you haven’t yet given permission, you will be asked to allow IGTV access to your video library.

2. Select the video you want to upload.

3. Click Next in the top right-hand corner.

4. Add your preferred video title and description, and edit the cover image, which users will see before the video begins playing.

5. Click Post to publish your video. 

You can also upload a video to IGTV from the native Instagram app. Here are the steps:

1. Navigate to your profile and select the plus sign icon on the top right-hand side of the screen. 

2. When the Create menu pops up, select IGTV video. 

3. Select the video you want to upload, choose your preferred cover, and add a title and description.

4. Click Post to IGTV. 

IGTV Analytics

IGTV provides the following in-app analytic insights for your videos: views, likes, comments, average percentage watched, reach, saves, and interactions. 

To get these insights, open your IGTV app and click on one of your published videos. Then, follow these steps:

1. Open your video, and then click the “…” icon at the bottom.

2. Select View Insights.

3. The IGTV Video Insights menu should appear and contain your audience analytics info. As this video is just a test, there is no analytics data for the video.

The image below displays the IGTV channel preview from popular internet show The Daily Show. 

Watching Videos on IGTV

As soon as you open the IGTV app, a video will immediately start playing — presumably with the hope that users will become immersed in the content.

To watch a video, simply click on it. If you’re not interested in watching it anymore, you can scroll up to see other options.

There are four video categories: For You, Following, Popular, and Continue Watching. You can scroll left and right to view your options and select the one you want to watch. As mentioned above, you can also use the search bar to search for channels you’re already familiar with or to see if someone you’re interested in has a channel. 

To watch an IGTV video within the Instagram app, navigate to a user’s profile, select the IGTV icon, and pick the video you want to watch.

Best IGTV Channels and Brands to Follow

There are hundreds of brands and channels that create impressive and unique IGTV content. If your business is starting from scratch and looking for inspiration, here are a few channels and brands you’ll want to check out: 

• Netflix

• NAACP

• The Daily Show

• National Geographic

• Food Network

Top Influencers on IGTV

While IGTV doesn’t have the same audience reach as Instagram or YouTube, it is still a worthwhile platform to use to reach your audience members, especially if they don’t use other video sharing apps you’re on like TikTok, Snapchat, or YouTube. 

Below is a list of IGTV content creators using the platform to create content that appeals to their specific niche.

• LaBeautyologist

• Hannah Stocking

• AskDrJess

• Huda Kattan

• David Chang

Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide whether IGTV offers valuable benefits for your business. It’s critical you consider your audience’s preferences when deciding — would they prefer to watch your brand on IGTV, or are they consuming content elsewhere?

If you feel your brand does well in relatively unmarked territory, perhaps you want to give IGTV a try. Get out your camera, record some unedited behind-the-scenes looks at your company, and press Post. Your audience insights will tell you soon enough whether it’s an avenue worth pursuing.

Businesses pump out content at a staggering rate these days — and as that volume increases, more inconsistencies are bound to creep in. Whether due to lack of clarity about the style in which you’d like to write or disjointed communication across the multitude of content creators in your organization, failure to decide upon and document accepted editorial guidelines is a recipe for inconsistent messaging.

That’s why at some point, most companies accept that they’ll need to develop a writing style guide.

In short: a document that indicates the basic rules of writing we’ll all agree to follow to ensure consistency across all our content — like whether I should’ve capitalized the “a” after the colon in this sentence.

Answer: If you write content for HubSpot, you should not capitalize the “a.”

But wait… if that’s the case, why would I capitalize the “If” in that last parenthetical? Because “If you write content for HubSpot, you should…” is a complete sentence, thus warranting the capital “If.”

These conventions are specified in our writing style guide.

If you found that train of thought terribly banal, you might think writing style guides are the most boring things in the world and have a burning desire to click away right about now. Au contraire, mon frère.

Why Writing Guides Are Important

The existence of a writing style guide is what saves you from finding yourself embroiled in a debate about whether there should be spaces before and after an ellipses, whether you capitalize “for” in a title, or when a number must be written out in full.

If the writing style guide bores you, just imagine how insipid that debate will be. The existence of a style guide means you can simply have the style guide handy as your little writing rulebook without having to sit through debates about blockquotes.

Writing Style Guide Example

If you want to see a writing style guide in action, check out the one created by HubSpot Partner Yokel Local. Their writing style guide (or “editorial style guide” as they call it) was made to keep both their in-house contributors and their freelancers on the same page when writing and editing marketing content for clients.

Source: Yokel Local

You’ll notice that they didn’t go too far in the weeds, either. The whole guide is 15 pages in large, attractive lettering, and anything not explicitly stated in the guide is left up to the AP Stylebook and the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The simplicity is effective, and they clearly had fun designing the document to be cohesive with their brand guidelines.

In an effort to help you get started with your own style guide, this blog post will walk you through the essential elements of a brand writing style guide so you can create one for yourself.

What to Include in Your Writing Style Guide

Style Manual

Style manuals are reference books that tell writers how to handle grammar, punctuation, and any special use cases. Most businesses adopt either the AP Stylebook or the Chicago Manual of Style. It’s up to you to decide which manual you’d like your company to follow.

You can purchase online subscriptions to these manuals for your employees to reference, the login for which you should also include in this section of the editorial style guide to make access simple. You might find employees are more likely to reference these tools when provided with an online subscription that contains a search function instead of a paper book through which they have to flip to find their answers.

While these style guides provide a good reference point for basic grammar rules, you’ll probably want to make some exceptions to the rules therein for the sake of branding, tone, and style. Use this section of your editorial style guide to outline those exceptions and also to highlight some of the rules that commonly arise when writing for your company that people should commit to memory — regardless of whether it is aligned with or against house style. For example:

• What do you capitalize? Do you capitalize the name of your product? Are there certain prepositions you want capitalized in your title despite your stylebook’s recommendations?
• What do you abbreviate? How do you punctuate those abbreviations? Would you type “a.k.a.” or “aka”? “Okay” or “O.K.”? Or “OK”?
• Do you use an Oxford comma?

Listing answers to common questions like these in the first part of your editorial style guide will give people an easy resource to reference that will save you time and encourage consistency. Feel free to continue adding to this list as more confusions arise and get resolved during the content creation process. You’re creating your own style guide, so feel free to borrow different rules from different style guides. The important thing is that you use the same rules consistently throughout all the content you create.

Commonly Troublesome Words

Most companies have terminology that’s specific to their industry, and not all of that terminology has a universally agreed-upon spelling. For instance, if you write a lot about digital marketing like we do here at HubSpot, you’ll find a lot of inconsistency around the spelling and capitalization of words like these:

• ebook vs. Ebook vs. e-book
• ecommerve vs. e-commerce
• internet vs. Internet
• website vs. web site
• Facebook Like vs. Facebook like
• Retweet vs. re-tweet vs. reTweet vs. ReTweet

… And on and on and on. Instead of debating how to spell, capitalize, or hyphenate these words, include a section in your style guide called “Commonly Troublesome Words” so writers can easily look up the proper spelling of these words according to your house style guide.

Advice for Global Companies

If you have global readership and create content for specific, same-language markets, you should include notes on whether you change spelling for those markets or retain your house style.

For example, if marketers from HubSpot’s Dublin office write a blog post, should American editors change their spelling of “favour” to “favor”? “Internationalise” to “Internationalize”? These questions should be answered in your style guide, and the “Commonly Troublesome Words” section is a logical location to do that.

Similarly, if you are creating content in different languages, style guides should be created for each different language.

Style and Tone

This section of the editorial style guide should address something less concrete than grammar rules but arguably more important: how your content should sound to the reader.

Can writers use the first person? How do you feel about the use of industry jargon? Think about the words you would use to describe your content in an ideal world. Which of these adjectives do you want your content to evoke?

• Conversational?
• Educational?
• Academic?
• Funny?
• Controversial?
• Irreverent?
• Artistic?
• Objective?
• Sophisticated?

You might think you want your content to be all of the above, but force yourself to prioritize just a few. Explain why it’s important to achieve this style and tone in your content, and provide examples of content (excerpts are fine) that are successful in doing so — particularly if those excerpts exist on your own site already. If there are stylistic characteristics your content absolutely should not have, this is the section in which to include that information, too. Again, examples of what not to do are helpful here for the sake of comparative illustration.

When deciding on style and tone, be sure to consider your target audience and buyer personas in the process. Which style and tone would resonate best with them? This brings us to our next section…

Personas

Buyer personas are inextricably tied to style and tone, so it’s important to include this section either before or after the “Style and Tone” section of your style guide. Why is it so important to include personas? Because the style and tone you adopt should be informed by your target audience, i.e. the people that will be reading all this stuff you’re writing.

That being said, the personas in your editorial style guide don’t need to go as in-depth as the personas created by your sales and marketing teams. (Those might include detailed information like objections that arise in the sales process and how to overcome them, or tips on identifying these personas “in the wild” or when you get them on the phone.)

The personas in your editorial style guide should be more brief, simply pulling out the highlights that concisely explain who your target audience is, their pain points, how they like to be communicated with, the value your company provides, and a picture to give writers a visual to keep in mind when creating content.

Including personas in your style guide really comes in handy when you’re working with freelance writers. If you’re doing a good job with freelance writer management, you’ll provide ample context to inform the content they’re writing. A persona, and how that informs tone and writing style, should always be included when kicking off a new freelance writer engagement.

Graphics and Formatting

I know, I told you earlier not to get into the nitty gritty with visual guidelines. This is still true. Your design team or agency should create a separate brand design style guide that addresses more nuanced visual… things. (Can you tell I’m not a designer?)

You should, however, add a little information to your written style guide if your writers are ever responsible for creating visual assets and/or copyediting visual assets created by designers. Here are some common questions that may come up that will impact writers or editors:

• Where can writers source images, and how do they properly attribute them?
• When should images align to the right, to the left, or in the center?
• Should text wrap around images?
• What are the RGB and hex codes for your text and headers?
• What typefaces can be used?
• Can writers use italics, bold, or underlining? If so, is usage limited to certain occasions, like bolding headers and hyperlinks?
• Which kind of bullets should be used (square, round, or other), and how should they align with the rest of the text?
• How should numbered lists appear: “1”, “1.” or “1.)”?

Many of these graphical elements can be preset in your content management system, but they can be easily overridden when writers copy and paste content from elsewhere with formatting attached — or by an overzealous writer with a flair for design. Outline these expectations in your editorial style guide, and refer those with more advanced needs to your brand style guide.

Approved and Unapproved Content

Great content often cites research and data from third party sources. Make your writer’s job easier by providing approved industry resources from which they can draw — and, even more importantly, resources from which they cannot draw. Break up this section of your editorial style guide into two sections: recommended and approved industry resources, and “do not mention” resources.

The information in the “do not mention” section should include competitors and unreliable resources, and it should also mention controversial topics and opinions that should be avoided at all costs. For example, many companies strictly prohibit any mention of politics or religion in their content, or have provisions that explain when it is acceptable to include and how to frame the discussion. Similarly, many companies work within certain legal restrictions, in which case this section of the style guide might provide instructions for receiving legal approval before publishing a piece of content.

This is the section of your editorial style guide to explain the intricacies of such controversies as they relate to your brand so you can prevent reputation management catastrophes.

Sourcing

With great research comes great responsibility… and a lot of choices, unfortunately. Clear up the confusion around how to properly cite research by deciding on one methodology and documenting it in your editorial style guide. Explain how to create footnotes, references, links to external sites, or even bibliographies if they are relevant to your company.

This section of your editorial style guide doesn’t need to be long. Just write down the rules and provide some examples of proper citations so writers can easily attribute their sources properly.

Examples to Show What’s Right and Wrong

Every section of your editorial style guide can benefit from real life examples of the concepts you’re explaining, whether you include those examples on the same page or as an appendix at the end of the guide.

For example, when talking about proper formatting, include a visual example of a well-formatted blog post with callouts that detail why the elements therein are successful. If you’re discussing grammar usage, provide an incorrect example, and then mark it up to show how a writer could fix it to align with your editorial style guide.

Bridging your requirements with proper executions from your actual website will help illustrate these concepts more clearly and cut down on follow-up questions and instances of exceptions to the rules you’ve laid out.

What Not to Include In Your Style Guide

It can be tempting to create the most comprehensive style guide of all time. But when documents get incredibly long, it can become a little hard to use on a day-to-day basis. Aim for “comprehensive, yet usable” by intentionally cutting some sections. The most common sections that people are tempted to include, but which I recommend exist in another document, are:

• Notes on content operations. Things like submitting content to your editorial team, requesting a slot on the editorial calendar, or revision cycles.
• Recommendations for creating SEO-friendly content.
• Nitty gritty rules around logo usage or other visual style guide elements. With some basic exceptions, these would be saved for a separate brand or visual style guide.

Your editorial style guide will simply guide writers by providing a set of standards to which they must adhere when creating content for your website. It eliminates confusion, guesswork, and debates over what boils down to a matter of editorial opinion among grammar and content geeks. If you’re ever unsure whether something should or should not exist in your written style guide, fall back on usage to inform your decision. If it’s too long to be usable, cut it down; if it’s too short to answer the most common questions, beef it up.

How to Get Others to Use Your Style Guide

If you put in all this work to create a comprehensive style guide, it’d be a real bummer if no one used it.

Here’s the truth: Some people just aren’t going to use it, no matter how easy you make it for them to do so. So just… accept that. But after you’re done grieving, there are a few things you can do to increase the likelihood of adoption:

1. Involve other people in its creation from the get-go.

No one wants to be the Grammar Czar. And if you do, I promise you no one you work with thinks its cute. Instead of mandating the rules your entire company must use when writing, get a few people together to help create the style guide as a group. Ideally, this little committee will span more than one department to increase the likelihood of widespread adoption.

2. Make it easy to find and use.

Our style guide is available on our internal wiki so it’s easy for people to find, bookmark, and Ctrl+F to get answers to questions quickly. Make yours similarly easy to access and use.

3. Keep updating it.

Your style guide is intended to be a living document. As new questions arise, make it easy for writers to ask questions about proper usage and get a resolution — and make sure that resolution is reflected in an updated version of the style guide.

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

During my career, I have freelanced on and off. The biggest lesson I’ve learned in working with clients was the importance of setting expectations from the very beginning.

It helps both parties get on the same page and can prevent miscommunication down the line. That’s why you often have initial discovery calls, set meetings, and draft contracts.

Another way to set expectations is by creating a design brief. It’s essential in the early stages of your design project, whether you’re working with someone in-house or outsourcing it to an agency or independent contractor.

Here’s everything you need to know about what to include in a design brief and the templates that will help you create one quickly.

Think of this brief as a blueprint: It lays out all the information your designer will need to complete the project and helps align both parties on the expectations. Typically, the client (or brand) will fill out most sections in the brief once they know what they’re looking for.

The assigned designer will then complete it based on conversations with the client. It serves as a baseline from which to build the project.

So when would you use a design brief? For:

• A website (re)design
• A logo (re)design
• A (re)branding package
• Creative assets for social media or ad campaign
• Video assets

What to Include in your Design Brief Template

1. An Overview of Your Brand

The first thing you’ll want to outline in your design brief is information about your brand. This gives a big-picture understanding of your business and helps frame the rest of the brief.

Here’s what to include:

• Your industry
• Your products and/services
• Your unique selling position (USP)
• Your mission and your values
• Your competitors

In this section, you can also list your direct and indirect competitors, depending on the project.

If you already know who you will be working with on this project, list the decision-makers for the project and any key stakeholders involved. Outlining the points of contact right from the beginning will streamline the workflow and prevent communication silos.

2. Your Project Overview

As one of the most important sections in your brief, spend time figuring out what you’re looking for before writing this section.

Don’t know where to start? Answer this question: What problems are you trying to solve? This provides context for the intention behind the project and can also help the designer generate new ideas. It’s like going to the doctor. You have to say where it hurts for them before they can prescribe something for relief.

For instance, let’s say you want to redesign your website. The reason could be your users aren’t converting, or because the company has recently shifted and needs a website to reflect this change. Knowing the reason behind the project is equally as important as the project itself.

Next, state your goals and objectives. What do you want to accomplish through this project? Is this a part of something larger? Are there any roadblocks that could hinder your project?

The more detailed you can get, the better. Your goals could include improving website conversions, reducing bounce rates, and/or increasing traffic. It all depends on the project.

Answering these questions will be instrumental in aligning your vision with the designer and creating the space to address any potential issues.

Finally, this section should list your deliverables, such as:

• Required assets (illustrations, photos, videos, mockups, wireframes)
• File formats
• Dimensions

3. Your Branding Guidelines

Unless your design project is for branding, list your branding guidelines in your design brief. This breaks down the rules your designer will need to follow and keep in mind for your project. Rules relating to your:

• Color palette
• Brand voice and tone
• Typography
• Logo

For any design project, you want to make sure your designer creates something that aligns with your brand identity. If you’re in the process of developing your brand identity, you can also provide mood boards to help the designer understand your vision and the direction you’re heading in.

4. Your Target Market

Every design project is developed with the end-user in mind. In this section, dive into who that user is.

Describe your user persona and how you imagine them interacting with this project once it is completed. If you have already done some market research, you should list your target audience’s demographics, behavioral habits, values, interests, and online behavior.

For instance, let’s say you’re an affordable shaving cream brand for men and your current branding and messaging aren’t resonating with consumers. After running a few experiments, you’ve realized that your target market doesn’t see your brand as approachable, inviting, or relatable.

For your design project, you’ll want to revamp your branding package to reflect your consumers. By knowing more about your target market, your designer can use their knowledge of design principles and studies to create a product suited to your audience’s needs.

5. Your Budget and Timeline

These are the nitty-gritty details that are necessary to determine the right partner for your project. You may find a designer who’s great but cannot meet your expectations in terms of timeline.

Similarly, you may find out during a discovery call with a design agency that they cannot work within your budget.

Outlining your budget and timeline will help to weed out people who aren’t the best fit for your project. While timelines can be flexible, it’s important to set an ideal timeframe from the beginning and adjust later, if needed.

Once you select a designer or agency, together you’ll decide on milestones or deadlines during the length of the project.

A Design Brief Example

Your design brief should be detailed, providing as much context as possible to facilitate your designer’s understanding.

This video creative brief template presents the key questions you’ll need to answer to write an effective brief. 

Having templates for each type of design project saves time and can ensure that everyone on your team follows the same process.

Design Brief Generators

1. HubSpot’s Creative Brief Template

If you’re looking for a set of design brief templates to use for future projects, HubSpot’s got you covered.

The document includes three creative brief templates designed with different goals in mind:

• A campaign template for when you’re launching an ad campaign and need to outsource the creative assets.
• A video template for a video project that involves ideation, production, and distribution.
• A client template for both designs and marketing managers who are working on a design project.

Each template includes detailed sections to help you flesh out the key elements of your project and build an effective design brief for every situation.

The best part? It’s free.

2. CreateBrief

Createbrief is a great place to start if you’ve never created a design brief before.

The tool is designed like a survey, asking you key questions about your brand to understand what you’re looking for and your requirements.

Once you answer all of the questions, you get a design brief that you can share with others through a custom URL. While it isn’t very in-depth, it can be useful during the initial process of building your brief.

There’s no sign-up required and you can use the tool as soon as you land on the webpage.

3. Bonsai’s Design Brief Generator

Bonsai is a freelance management app that helps freelancers manage their clients. If you’re a small business looking to outsource your design work, you can build a design brief template right on the platform.

Once you create it, you can also send it via email for approval and get read notifications.

What’s great about Bonsai is that its templates are typically reviewed by experts, ensuring that it will have everything you need for your project.

To use the template, you must enter your email and sign up for the software.

4. TemplateLab

The TemplateLab offers hundreds of free customizable templates you can sift through and download.

The site currently has 50 design brief templates, ranging from website briefs to interior design briefs. A standout feature on the website is the ability to see exactly what’s included in the template before you download it.

Once you download it to Microsoft Word, you can customize it to meet your needs.

While you could start your design project without a brief, fleshing out the details ahead of time ensures everyone is on the same page. It’s a short, but important step that will save you time (and money) down the line.