Category Archives: B2B

After months of testing, Instagram announced a big change to its user interface (UI) in late 2020: replacing the user “Activity” tab with the “Shop” tab, the social platform’s latest move to be more business-friendly.

It’s a big evolution from where the feature was just a few years ago. Today, it’s infinitely easier for users to shop products from brands without ever leaving the app.

So, how exactly does the tool work and how can you leverage it to generate revenue? Find out everything you need to know in the sections below.

Why Your Business Should Sell on Instagram

Thanks to the Instagram shoppable posts feature and other supportive tools (like the product wishlist, product launch reminder, and shopping stickers on Instagram Stories), users can go through the entire buyer’s journey, from discovery to checkout.

Social media platforms are typically seen as great brand awareness tools. However, Instagram’s new integrations have made it a big revenue driver.

A 2019 Facebook study revealed that 54% of respondents purchased items in the moment or some time after seeing a product or service on Instagram.

And it’s not only direct-to-consumer brands that can benefit from using Instagram’s shopping features. A Q4 2020 report by HootSuite revealed that 36.2% of B2B decision-makers use the app to source new products and/or services.

Shoppable posts are marked with a clickable shopping bag icon that displays the product information and the “View Products” call-to-action to visit the brand’s Shop page.

This creates a seamless experience for the user and allows you to advertise your products without being too promotional.

1. Meet the eligibility criteria.

There are a few eligibility requirements you must check off before you start selling on Instagram. You must:

• Be located in one of these markets.
• Have an Instagram business or creator account.
• Sell physical goods that comply with Instagram’s merchant agreement and commerce policies.
• Connect your Instagram account to a Facebook Business Page.

Once you meet the above requirements, follow the steps below.

2. Upload your product catalog.

Your catalog is a file that contains the products you want to sell along with their information, such as pricing and description. There are two ways to upload your product catalog:

• Take the do-it-yourself route through the Facebook Business Manager by manually adding the items.
• Connect to an ecommerce platform partner, such as Shopify or BigCommerce. Find a full list of compatible partners here.

How to Upload Your Products Manually

To create a catalog through Facebook, you must first have a Facebook Business Manager account, which is different from a Business page. From there, head to the Commerce Manager and set up your catalog.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do it.

It’s very important to keep your product catalog synced with your Instagram Page, and that your product descriptions and prices are accurate. If you’re running a sale or promotion, be sure to update your product catalog to reflect it.

How to Upload Your Products through an Ecommerce Platform

A second way to connect your Instagram Business Profile to a Facebook catalog is to do it through an ecommerce platform. Here are the steps using two popular platforms.

Shopify

Before you get started, you need to have the Facebook sales channel (included in all paid Shopify plans) installed on your Shopify store, which creates a Shop tab on your Facebook page.

For specific details on how to connect your Facebook page to your Shopify account, you can view the Shopify guide here.

Once you’ve done the above, you can easily add the Instagram Sales Channel to your Shopify store, which connects the products from your Shopify page to your Instagram business profile.

To do this, head to your Shopify admin and click on the “+” button located beside the “Sales Channels” heading.

Next, on the “Add sales channel” dialogue, click “Instagram” and then “Add channel.”

You’ll need to log into your Facebook account page to authenticate your Instagram account in the sales channel.

Once the Instagram Sales Channel is installed, you can enable the feature in your settings on Instagram.

BigCommerce

Start by opening Channel Manager on your BigCommerce account and click “Get Started” next to Facebook.

On the next screen, confirm that you’re using a compatible currency, sign up for a Facebook account (if you don’t have one), review the product requirements, then click “Get Started.”

Next, fill out your details on the Configuration page, including your business’ contact email, phone number, and the Facebook Page you’d like your shop to appear on.

Here’s the complete BigCommerce guide on how to do it.

Once Facebook approves your catalog, head back to Channel Manager, click “Get Started” next to Instagram, and confirm that your store meets the requirements.

3. Submit your account for review.

Once you’ve connected your product catalog to your Instagram account, you can submit your account for approval.

1. Go to your professional dashboard. Once there, click on “Set Up Instagram Shopping.”

2. On the setup page, click on “Get Started.”3. Select your catalog.

4. Review the details and click “Submit for Review.”

The approval process can take a few days. You may also need to provide additional information, such as domain verification.

How to Tag Products with Instagram Shoppable Posts

Once you get access to shoppable posts on Instagram and you’ve completed all the steps listed above, adding tags to your posts is quick and easy.

1. Upload your image and once you’re done editing, hit “Next.”

2. Click on “Tag Products.”

3. Tap on the item in your image you want to tag.

4. Search for the product and select it.

5. Click on “Done” and share the image.

Have an older post that still gets good traction, but doesn’t have a shoppable tag? You can tag products in both new and existing posts from your Instagram Business Profile, up to five products per single image post or 20 products per multi-photo (or carousel) post.

How to Optimize Your Posts for Shoppable Purchases

1. Create posts that feel natural to the Instagram feed.

While selling on Instagram is easier than ever, remember that your audience shouldn’t feel like they are being sold to. You should maintain their current content strategy, incorporating shoppable tags on photos that are a natural fit for your profile.

2. Leverage influencer content.

A great way to organically add shopping tags to your post is by leveraging posts from consumers. Studies show consumers trust influencers much more than brands and these posts serve as social proof, i.e., credibility and validation for the brand.

For example, Fe Noel recently reposted this post from a fashion influencer and added the product tag.

You can also optimize your Instagram sales strategy by using influencer posts. Influencer collaborations and sponsorships have nearly replaced traditional ads and are a huge part of social media strategies today.

55% of fashion shoppers have purchased a fashion item after seeing it promoted on the platform, according to a 2020 post from Instagram’s creator account.

Below, popular fashion model Michelle Dee is shown sporting a Herschel Supply suitcase on the brand’s profile:

An Instagram influencer’s stamp of approval goes a long way and is a great strategy to drive sales from your Instagram shoppable posts.

3. Optimize your post with multiple tags.

Lastly, including multiple shopping tags in your photos will help your audience explore and browse through your products quickly. You can also try adding shopping tags to carousel posts to test their performance against single-photo posts.

4. Activate the Shop page on your Instagram profile.

Create at least nine shoppable posts to activate the “Shop” tab on your Instagram profile. This will group all your shoppable posts under one tab for easy shopping and product discovery.

Measuring the Results of Your Shoppable Posts

Instagram business accounts have access to analytics for their shoppable posts, including data on how many people viewed product information and clicked through to the product page. This information helps determine what type of products resonate with your Instagram followers and identify gaps in the buyer’s journey.

As with all of your social media marketing efforts, you should measure performance data to see what drives the best results (and why) and use that to inform future posts.

Once your business begins selling on Instagram, keep experimenting with images, copy, shopping tags, and other factors that may contribute to your sales.

No matter what type of products you sell, delving into your analytics allows you to understand your audience’s wants, improves your content, and ultimately helps you drive more traffic and sales.

Selling on Instagram is a unique opportunity to reach users in all stages of the buyer journey through a seamless experience.

In early 2020, the world as we knew it was flipped upside down. Businesses were forced to pivot in the face of the pandemic, and as a result many companies adopted a remote work culture.

Remote work changed the way organizations and teams worked — and even how companies communicated to prospective customers and acquired new business. Employees leaned into virtual designs, presentations, and events to communicate both internally and externally.

The graphic design landscape, as a result, has changed dramatically over the past year.

Now, presentations need to work harder than ever to connect, engage, and inspire audiences into action. In fact, over 35 million PowerPoint presentations are given each day to over 500 million audiences — but 79% of those audiences believe most presentations they see are boring.

To help you crush your next presentation deck, we’ve rounded up the top presentation design trends of 2021, as predicted by creative industry experts and presentation power-users.

Here, learn from three creative experts from leading companies in the tech space on the four biggest presentation design trends that will emerge in 2021.

1. There will be increased empathy found in design.

Marissa Latshaw, Founder of Latshaw Marketing, says: “Impactful, inspiring design starts with empathy.

Empathy is one of the most powerful tools in the creative toolbox. The good news is that empathy — the ability to feel, understand, and respond to the feelings of others — is innate in us all. Our job as creators is to harness this empathy for better design, marketing, and storytelling.

Empathy boosts creativity. The empathy/creativity connection is strong — as shown in many studies over the past decade. One study asked participants to create and name a potato chip product for pregnant women. Before beginning the task, half of the participants were told to envision how the consumer would feel while eating the snack. The other half were asked to imagine what the consumer would think. An independent jury found the product concepts of the first, feelings-focused, empathy-activated group to be more original than the control group.

Empathy is also vital for inclusivity. More than ever, we want to communicate with others in a way that is genuinely inclusive. An empathetic approach ensures we understand the goals, needs, fears, and values of all the people we wish to engage (beyond just the way they relate to our brand or product). This is a call for us all to become proactive about inclusivity, and it starts with empathy.

Empathy creates connection. From in-home fitness giant Peloton to the new voice-based, social network Clubhouse, we are constantly finding new and innovative ways to connect with one another.

Both brands demonstrate empathy as they address the palpable and growing need for connection. They re-imagined how we work out and share conversations in a more socially-connected way.

Designing anything — from a presentation to an ad campaign — is no different. Each is an opportunity to reimagine and innovate how we engage and connect with the world.

Empathy helps us to stand out by standing in another’s shoes. Creating one-of-a-kind, empathy-driven experiences ultimately brings us closer together and inspires action.”

2. Designers will lean into radical simplicity.

Eliot Garcia Weisberg, Creative Director at Airbnb, talks to us about all things radical simplicity.

He says, “Despite its incredible power to connect us, teleconferencing stunts audience energy and empathy. Attention — already a fleeting resource — is further divided between the screens, speakers, slides, and sounds of the virtual landscape.

The feedback loop from audience to presenter is nearly dead. The impact of environmental design is lost. In our new world, the value of a single pixel on the cluttered screens of remote audiences is immense. And the screens themselves— their quality and colors— vary wildly from member to member.

The key to designing for the ‘new normal’ is embracing radical simplicity. A designer must reduce a slide to its core idea, then push to simplify even further. They musk ask themselves — ‘Do I really need to show this?’ Then challenge themselves every time the answer is ‘Yes.’

Slide counts will be drastically reduced. Superfluous icons will fade away. Bullets will become a distant memory. Subtle textures will be replaced by solid colors. We’ll see a shift away from image masks and bold text over photos. Instead, we’ll see full-screen photographs or simple statements that make their point obvious and drive core concepts home.

We’ll spend more time on the speaker— full screen— than ever before. Their delivery, from tone to inflection, will become a design element. Rehearsals will replace design reviews. 

The end result will feel much more human. And, if successful, radically simple.”

3. Great design will hold the viewers’ attention.

“For decades, the job of creative designers, writers, and videographers was to get attention. Cut through the noise. Deliver ads that stand out. Use creativity as a hook,” Adam Morgan, Adobe’s Executive Creative Director, says about holding an audience’s attention.

He adds, “But in today’s ultra-connected digital world, that hammer and nail approach isn’t always the answer. People choose what they want. The trend I’m seeing today is to hold attention. Less push and more pull. We have to create experiences that provide real value to an individual — not just catch their attention with shock value or clickbait.

 “We have to create communities where people want to consume our brand experiences. We have to know those individuals and groups, what they care about, and provide new information wrapped in an emotional blanket. We have to stand for things they value.”

Rather than a hard sell, we have to share a story that they believe in and be open and transparent with why it matters to them.

What this means for creative teams is that you can’t just make it pretty or funny. You have to think deeply about what your brand means to customers and then create immersive experiences that connect. It’s no longer just about the creative craft of colors and fonts and icons. It’s about stories and meaning and authenticity and purpose. Don’t just get attention with your work. Hold attention. So that you can build brands that grow and last.”

4. Designers should use clean, minimalistic fonts and calming colors.

Lastly, we tapped into Beautiful.ai’s Creative Director Anuja Kanani’s expertise to unravel one more presentation design trend for 2021.

Kanani says, “Choosing the best colors for a presentation, and good presentation fonts, are two of the most important elements of deck design. Each design decision— shapes, words, and images— affect the way your audience feels about the presentation, but colors hold the most influence.

Taking the place of bold, bright primary colors, 2021 has warranted more relaxed, muted colors following the chaos of 2020. Not only are low-saturated and pastel colors more calming, they’re more organic and natural, perhaps making audiences feel more at ease and confident in the presentation in front of them.

Using a consistent, complimentary color theme strategically can help position your brand in the mind of your customers,” adds Kanani. She recommends limiting your presentation to 3-4 colors in your palette, with one accent color to highlight key points and bring balance and harmony to your presentation.

The trend of minimalism extends to good presentation fonts, too. Seasoned presenters are opting for clean minimal fonts, such as Open Sans or Jost, and rejecting traditional fonts like Arial or Times New Roman in 2021.

Kanani adds, “Custom typography improves your brand recognition, while selecting different weights or styles can help control the narrative on each slide.”

Presentation Graphics

You’ve probably caught onto the fact that over-complicated slides are a thing of the past. Studies show that 35% of millennials say they will only engage with content they feel has a great story or theme, so to avoid boring them into a snooze, use visuals to control your narrative.

Presentation graphics, or rich visuals, can help you paint a picture in bite-sized chunks so that your audience can digest the information you’re presenting to them.

Kanani says, “Engaging, inspiring visuals in presentations make your content compelling, eye-catching, and helps convey your story beautifully.”

Choosing rich icons, diagrams or infographics, and quality photos are powerful tools to help make your presentation more memorable and impactful.

Ultimately, design is an art, not a science. However, ideally you can use these trends as inspiration for your own branded designs in 2021 and beyond. 

As a job seeker, you can often expect to speak with an HR professional before moving onto interviews with employees within the department for which you’re applying.

It’s critical you prepare well for your HR interview. Oftentimes, a company uses their HR department to screen candidates and decide which candidates are most qualified to move forward in the interview process.

But an HR professional has different goals when interviewing than your direct hiring manager does. While your hiring manager will ask questions specific to the role (for example, in a marketing interview), the HR professional is interested in gaining broader insights regarding culture fit and whether you demonstrate the company’s values.

With that in mind, let’s go over the definition for this interview and what you can expect.

It’s easy to underemphasize HR interviews in comparison to interviews with, say, your potential manager. There’s even a misconception that the HR round is only a formality. But the truth is that this interview is critical to the hiring process.

It allows you to establish a positive first impression. Your HR contact decides whether you get to move forward, so you’ll want to make sure you exhibit your competencies and establish rapport.

I spoke with Alexa Matthews, a senior recruiter here at HubSpot, who pointed out some additional benefits to the screening process — “It’s an opportunity for a great first impression. In the first call, a candidate can often convey things that are not written on their resume. We take that information so that we can be their advocate and make recommendations to hiring managers throughout the process.”

Additionally, Alexa mentioned initial interview screens help candidates learn more about the role and evaluate their interest in the company. At the same time, these initial interviews help HR professionals set a candidate up for success by learning what is required of the role and providing the candidate with feedback throughout all stages of the interview process.

Let’s go over a few of the questions you might have about the HR interview.

What can I expect from an HR interview?

During an HR round, you can expect high-level, general questions about you, your past work experience, and your motive for looking for a new position. Expect to receive questions that allude to your aptitudes and competencies, but that don’t go too in depth about role-specific responsibilities.

You can expect to be asked about:

• What you expect for your salary
• Why you’re looking for a new role
• Why you’re leaving your current company
• What you’re looking for in a new opportunity
• How you could function in a new environment
• How you’ve functioned in your former environment
• How you’ve handled conflict with coworkers
• How you’ve handled high-pressure situations

The HR interview can also cover the company’s benefits, work hours, and organizational structure.

Is HR round just a formality?

No. HR round isn’t a formality. It’s a highly important step in the hiring process and often the piece that determines whether you get to move forward in the recruitment process.

This is especially true for big firms, where your HR representative becomes an ally during the hiring process. They’re your point of contact for every question and concern you might have as you move from round to round. At HubSpot, recruiters give you feedback to help you successfully move forward.

To help you prepare for any questions you might receive from an HR professional, I’ve curated a list of top questions, along with the best sample answers.

1. Tell me about yourself.

One of the more traditional questions in this list, “Tell me about yourself” is nonetheless a helpful question for HR professionals to get a sense for how this conversation will go, and in which direction they should steer future questions.

Ultimately, you’ll want to be prepared to describe past roles, how those roles demonstrate your strengths, and what you want in a company and role moving forward. Additionally, make sure to include why you believe this role is a good match for your talents.

Sample Answer

“I graduated from ABC University in 20XX. Since then, I’ve worked my way up at Company X, from an intern blogging on the content team to an Associate SEO Strategist. Along the way, I’ve learned I work best in collaboration with a team, as opposed to more solitary roles. As an SEO strategist, I’ve discovered I enjoy the analytical side of marketing, and possess strengths that allow me to excel in those types of roles — in fact, as a result of my SEO efforts, traffic to our site has increased 13% over the past two years. I’m now looking for new challenges and believe your company, and this role, is a fantastic next step.”

Tips

• Focus on your prior accomplishments.
• Provide an overarching overview of your career up until this point without being long-winded.
• Try to use words from the job posting in your answer.
• End with the type of role or challenge that you’re looking for and why this company is a great fit.
• If you’re switching careers, provide a brief reason why.

Things to Avoid

• Don’t summarize your resume.
• Don’t start with where you were born or where you’ve lived (unless it’s related to the role. Say, you lived in Japan for a few years, and the role requires Japanese fluency).
• Leave out personal information.

2. Why are you interested in this position?

This question is a critical indicator as to whether you’re interested in this company and role in particular, or whether you’re simply applying to any role in the field. For instance, it’s not a good sign if you say, “Well, I’m interested in social media, so this role seemed like a good fit.” Instead, you want to mention specific qualifications of the role itself, and demonstrate how those qualifications align with your personal strengths. Additionally, it’s important you mention how you can help drive results for the team.

Sample Answer

“Through my last role, I’ve learned I’m passionate about creating content for social media. I’ve managed to grow our Instagram audience by 7%, and with my team I created a successful Facebook campaign that cultivated an increase in sales by 12%. I’ve followed your business on Instagram and Facebook for a few years and appreciate your brand — more importantly, I see this role as one in which I’d truly be challenged and able to use my strengths. In particular, I believe I’d excel in the client-facing aspect of the role. Meeting with clients to collaborate on social media marketing objectives and goals is something I find exciting and purposeful.”

Tips

• Be as specific as possible — mention how your interest in the industry, your prior experience, or your love for this company make you want to assume the role.
• Bring in information about the company’s culture into your answer.
• Express enthusiasm for the company and its offerings, especially if you’ve used its products before.
• Remember, use words from the job posting to emphasize your interest.
• If you’re switching careers, use this question to go more in depth into your motive for switching.

Things to Avoid

• Don’t mention money or benefits in your answer.
• Don’t be blase (“Oh, I’m just looking for a new role in this field”).

3. Why are you leaving your current job?

This is an opportunity to outline positive benefits you hope to gain by transitioning into a new role. However, one of the biggest mistakes you can make when answering this question is focusing on negative aspects of your current employer, rather than discussing positive aspects of the new company.

An HR professional will mark it as a red flag if you talk poorly about your current employer or company. It illustrates someone who isn’t very professional, has a negative attitude, and could bring toxic energy into their new work environment.

Sample Answer

“I appreciate everything my current employer has done to help me grow, and I believe working for a small startup over the past year has helped me develop leadership skills earlier than I could’ve at a larger corporation. However, I am now interested in transferring the skills I’ve acquired here to a larger organization, where I believe I’ll find more growth opportunities in the future.”

Tips

• Focus on career growth and skill development as a reason for looking for a new role.
• Express appreciation for your current employer without being overly positive (then they’ll wonder why you’re actually leaving).

Things to Avoid

• Whatever you do, don’t complain about your current employer, your boss, or your work environment.

4. Can you describe a work or school instance in which you messed up?

This is an intentionally tricky question. It’s meant to glean insight into whether you can learn from past mistakes. If you can’t think of any past errors, it could be an indicator you aren’t capable of accepting responsibility for your own mistakes. However, creating a long list of past mishaps could make you look unqualified for the role.

You’ll want to answer this question succinctly, and point out an error that doesn’t represent a lack of character. Consider one, well-intentioned error you’ve had in the past, mention it, and then talk about how you grew from that experience.

Sample Answer

“In my prior role when I first became manager, I took on too many tasks myself and quickly became both overwhelmed, and less efficient in my role. Additionally, my team members were frustrated because they felt there was a lack of collaboration on our team. I quickly recognized I needed to learn to delegate tasks and collaborate on projects with teammates, and became a more successful manager as a result.”

Tips

• Only focus on one incident.
• Close your answer with how you’ve improved or grown as a result of the incident, or what you’re currently doing to improve.
• Own the mistake you made without over-criticizing yourself.
• Be brief but earnest.

Things to Avoid

• Don’t shift the blame to a coworker or to the company.

5. Tell me about a time when you experienced conflict with a co-worker and how you dealt with it.

The HR professional isn’t interested in hearing about that time your co-worker said something snide about you in the kitchen, or when your manager overheard you gossiping about a client to a friend.

Instead, this question is asked to gain insight into how you handle professional conflict. At the office, conflict is bound to arise, particularly when you’re working closely with many different people. It’s critical you know how to handle conflict without pointing fingers. Your answer should primarily focus on the solution, and should show a level of empathy towards your colleagues, rather than focusing on the problem.

Sample Answer

“I had a deadline I needed to meet, and I was working with a designer who promised me her designs in time. When the deadline approached, my designer wasn’t ready. It made us both look poorly in front of our clients. To resolve the issue, I discussed the problem privately with my designer. She told me she was stressed out and overwhelmed, and simply needed another week on the project. I told her that was fine with me, but in the future, we needed to be transparent and honest with each other. Moving forward, we established guidelines and became more efficient teammates.”

Tips

• Like in the previous question, only focus on one incident, especifically one that has a positive outcome.
• Always close your answer with the steps you’ve taken to improve or how this incident resulted in positive change.
• Be balanced in your answer — don’t make it seem as if the conflict was entirely your coworker’s fault.
• Show empathy.

Things to Avoid

• Don’t blame-shift.
• Don’t focus on what you did right and what your co-worker did wrong (it’ll make you sound entitled).

6. What do you know about our company?

This is a fantastic opportunity to impress the interviewer. Ultimately, this question aims to gauge your level of interest in the company. The more you’ve researched prior accomplishments, company values, and basic information regarding the product or service, the more you can demonstrate a genuine desire to work there.

Sample Answer

“I know your company is ranked the number one web design firm in Massachusetts. Your mission statement in particular appeals to me. I also know your company emphasizes continual learning and growth, two aspects I find incredibly exciting. I’ve spoken to Jen and Mark, two marketers at your company, and they’ve described the work environment as one full of passion and innovation — which is something I hope to find in my next role.”

Tips

• Mention the company’s culture and your prior experience with its product.
• Be positive in your answer.
• Connect your answer with your desire to work for the firm and assume the role.

Things to Avoid

• Don’t unearth potentially controversial information, such as a company scandal.

7. How would you improve our current product or service?

An HR professional wants to know whether you’re innovative, whether you’re a quick-thinker, and whether you’ll bring new ideas to the role. There isn’t necessarily a wrong answer, here — you just need to show some creativity, and planning in advance will help. Consider potential problems they might be experiencing with their product or service, and how your unique skillset can fill that void.

Sample Answer

“I’ve noticed your product is in English, without current translation options. I believe your product could benefit from multilingual translations, which would help you appeal to a wider demographic. This could help you become more of a global leader. As someone who is fluent in French and Spanish, I’d like to potentially help spearhead a project that moves the product in that direction.”

Tips

• Be honest but brief about the product’s limitations.
• Focus on how you can help the company make the improvement.
• Mention how this change can help the company grow.
• Prepare for this question by using the product or service before the interview.
• Tastefully mention competitors and their products — it will show that you’re informed about the industry.

Things to Avoid

• Don’t “hate” on the product. (“Ugh, I used it once, and the UX was really buggy. I couldn’t get to X page…” )
• Don’t sing too many praises for the competitor’s product.

8. How would your current manager describe you?

It can be awkward to brag about yourself, so while this question may seem weird, it’s really the HR professional’s tactic for hearing how your current boss views you in a work environment. To feel less uncomfortable answering this question, thoughtfully consider your last performance review, and use direct quotes from your boss in your answer.

Sample Answer

“During my last performance review, my current manager told me she appreciates how quickly I take constructive feedback and use it to improve in my role. She’s grateful that she never needs to repeat areas of improvement to me — once she gives me feedback, I take it seriously and make sure she never needs to bring it up again. She has also described me as diligent and trustworthy, two aspects I believe are critical for excelling in any role.”

Tips

• Quote your manager directly.
• Be clear about your strengths — this is really your moment to shine.
• Focus on a single characteristic you’d like to highlight.
• Try to connect the strength to the role you’re applying for.

Things to Avoid

• Don’t focus on a specific accomplishment, but rather on a soft skill that can lead to sustainable growth in the role.
• Don’t start with “Well, I’m really good at…”

9. Where do you see yourself in five years?

This question allows the HR professional to understand your career aspirations — and gauge whether this company is the right place for you to grow. In many ways, this question works as a temperature check to ensure that this is a field you’d like to stay in for the foreseeable future.

Sample Answer

“In five years, I see myself driving organic growth at a medium or large company, overseeing the SEO strategy and potentially managing a team in a leadership role. In the past, I’ve focused on the execution side of SEO, but as I get further along in my career, I’ve wanted to get more into strategy, which helps drive sustainable growth. After working for a few years in X role, I want to lead a company’s SEO strategy to meet acquisition targets and exceed revenue goals.”

Tips

• Connect your answer to the role and how you feel you can grow in the company.
• Be realistic and specific.
• Mention words from the job description.
• Hint at how you can help the company grow later down the line.

Things to Avoid

• Don’t be blase or noncommittal.
• Don’t indicate that you’re hoping to leave the company for a better one, or that this role is just a stepping stone.

10. What questions do you have for me?

When an HR professional asks you this question, you might be eager to end the call and say, “Nope, no questions.” This would be a mistake. Having thoughtful, smart, strategic questions demonstrates your interest in the role, as well as your potential value as a future employee. They want to hire candidates who will ask questions and move the company forward, and this can’t happen if you accept everything as-is.

At this stage, you should consider what your genuine concerns are regarding the role. You might ask the interviewer, “What are the company’s values? What characteristics do you look for in candidates in order to represent those values?” Or, perhaps you’ll say, “What do you enjoy most about working at Company A?”

Ultimately, an interview isn’t just about allowing an HR professional to form an opinion of you — it’s also a chance for you to get a strong sense for whether you even want to work for the company. So use this last question to your advantage.

How do I prepare for HR round?

The HR interview is your only chance to make a lasting first impression. Because it determines whether you get to move forward, it’s important to prepare for the interview as if the HR professional gets to make the final decision. (They likely won’t, but they do determine whether you get to move forward.)

Luckily, it’s easy to prepare. Aside from knowing the questions you might be asked, you’ll want to research the company, reread the job description multiple times, practice your answers beforehand, and compile a list of questions to ask the HR rep.

Let’s go over these one-by-one.

1. Research the company.

Researching the company is a no-brainer, yet many of us walk into an interview with only a surface-level understanding of the company and its product offerings. In your research, seek to not only understand what the company sells but who it sells it to. Use the product beforehand if you can. Take a look at the firm’s competitors. Last, try to get a thorough understanding of the company’s culture.

2. Reread the job description multiple times.

I know that it’s difficult to keep track of job postings, especially if you’ve applied to tens upon tens of jobs. Try to find the original posting (or a copy of it on a job search site) and reread the description. If possible, print it out and highlight sections that you feel most match with your qualifications. Underline key terms, then bring those terms into your answers.

3. Practice your answers.

Practice, practice, practice. Practice in front of the mirror, in front of your camera, and in your room. But don’t memorize your answers — simply go over them a few times so that they’re eloquent, enthusiastic, and brief without feeling wooden or scripted. Use the STAR method to structure your answers. Don’t forget to focus on positive results.

4. Compile a list of questions.

These questions should be general enough that an HR professional can answer them (you wouldn’t want to ask something too team- or role-specific), but targeted enough that they feel tailored to the company.

You might ask general questions regarding the role, like “Are there opportunities for professional development within the role and department as a whole?” If they can’t answer these sorts of questions because they’re not acquainted with the team, you can ask about their experience and what it’s like to work at the company.

Prepare for Your HR Interview to Ensure Success

While the HR interview gets a bad reputation for being a formality, it’s arguably the most important step in the hiring process. Prepare beforehand, practice your answers, and research the company and its culture. The HR professional is your ally during the process. You want them to know that you’re the perfect fit for the role, which will get you closer to a job offer.

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

At the beginning of 2021, I was tasked with an assignment: Create a pie chart showcasing which types of content performed best on the Marketing Blog in 2020.

The question was an undeniably important one, as it would influence what types of content we wrote in 2021, along with identifying new opportunities for growth.

But once I’d compiled all relevant data, I was stuck — How could I easily create a pie chart to showcase my results?

Fortunately, I’ve since figured it out. Here, let’s dive into how you can create your own excel pie chart for impressive marketing reports and presentations. Plus, how to rotate a pie chart in excel, explode a pie chart, and even how to create a 3-dimensional version.

Let’s dive in.

How to Make a Pie Chart in Excel

1. Create your columns and/or rows of data. Feel free to label each column of data — excel will use those labels as titles for your pie chart. Then, highlight the data you want to display in pie chart form.

2. Now, click “Insert” and then click on the “Pie” logo at the top of excel.

3. You’ll see a few pie options here, including 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional. For our purposes, let’s click on the first image of a 2-dimensional pie chart.

4. And there you have it! A pie chart will appear with the data and labels you’ve highlighted.

If you’re not happy with the pie chart colors or design, however, you also have plenty of editing options.

Let’s dive into those, next.

How to Edit a Pie Chart in Excel

Background Color

1. You can change the background color by clicking on the paint bucket icon under the “Format Chart Area” sidebar.

Then, choose the fill type (whether you want a solid color as your pie chart background, or whether you want the fill to be gradient or patterned), and the background color.

Pie Chart Text

2. Next, click on the text within the pie chart itself if you want to rewrite anything, expand the text, or move the text to a new area of your pie chart.

Pie Chart Border

3. Within the Format Chart Area, you can edit the border of your pie chart as well — including the border transparency, width, and color.

Pie Chart Shadows

4. To change the pie chart box itself (including the box’s shadow, edges, and glow), click on the pentagon shape in the Format Chart Area sidebar.

Then, toggle the bar across “Transparency”, “Size”, “Blur”, and “Angle” until you’re happy with the shadow of your pie chart box.

Pie Chart Colors

5. Click the color paint palette, at the top left of excel, to change the colors of your pie chart.

Excel offers a range of complementary colors — including a few presets under “Colorful”, and a few presets under “Monochromatic”. You can click between the options until you find a color palette you’re happy with.

(Alternatively, if you want to change the colors of your pie chart pieces individually, simply double click on the pie chart piece, toggle onto the paint section of the Format Chart Area, and choose a new color.)

Chart Title

6. Change the chart title by clicking on the three bars graph icon in the top left of excel, and then toggling to “Chart Title > None”, “Chart Title > Above Chart”, or “Chart Title > Centered Overlay”.

Change Location of Data Labels

7. On the same three bar graph icon, click “Data Labels” to modify where your labels appear on the pie chart. (For instance, do you want the pie chart pieces labelled in the middle of each pie chart portion, or on the outside?)

Switch Row/Column

8. If you’d prefer to switch which data appears in the pie chart, click “Switch Row/Column” to see alternate information aligned from your original data set.

How to Explode a Pie Chart in Excel

1. To explode a piece of your pie chart (which can help you emphasize or draw attention to a specific section of your pie chart), simply double-click on the piece you want to pull away.

Then, drag your cursor until it’s the distance you want it, and you’re all set!

How to Create a 3D Pie Chart in Excel

1. To create a 3-dimensional pie chart in excel, simply highlight your data and then click the “Pie” logo.

2. Then, choose the “3-D Pie” option.

3. Finally, choose the design option you like at the top of your screen.

How to Rotate a Pie Chart in Excel

Finally, to rotate your pie chart, double-click on the chart and then click on the three-bar icon under “Format Data Point”.

Then, toggle the “Angle of first slice” until you’ve rotated the pie chart to the degree you want.

And there you have it! You’re well on your way to creating clean, impressive pie charts for your marketing materials to highlight important data and move stakeholders to take action.

Ultimately, you’ll want to experiment with all of excel’s unique formatting features until you figure out the pie chart that works best for your needs. Good luck!

When you come across a beautiful sight — be it a beach, a mountain, or your pet’s face — sometimes, it inspires you to think bigger about what certain sights and experiences mean.

For those moments, you might consider posting a photo on Instagram with an equally inspiring quote as the caption. But you could take it even further — and save characters — by posting the photo with the quote.

You’ve likely seen quotes on Instagram posts before, but you may never have created one for your brand’s account. Here’s a recent Instagram quote we shared here at HubSpot:

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by HubSpot (@hubspot)

Posting quote images on Instagram can diversify your content on the platform and humanize your brand a little, too. Everyone could use a motivational quote during a busy Monday morning or a slow Tuesday afternoon, so try out an Instagram quote for your next post with the help of these free apps.

Instagram Text Apps to Make Inspiring Quotes

Featured Resource: 9 Instagram Quote Templates

HubSpot created a collection of 9 Instagram quote templates for posts and stories – in addition to 13 more free Instagram posts for business. Download the collection of templates today to make Instagram quotes right in Google Slides for free.

1. Canva

iOS, Android, Mac, or Web App

Canva’s many features extend beyond text-based pictures and, for that matter, social media. But the mobile app and its gorgeous pre-made templates make it perfect for Instagram quotes.

Using the Canva’s social media post setting, you can draft banners, flyers, cards, and posts of all shapes and sizes using one of millions of pro-level photos for your quote background. Of course, feel free to snap a photo on the go, as well. One you select your image, you can choose from more than 100 fonts, adjust the size and color, and publish.

2. Pablo by Buffer

Web App or Chrome Extension

Pablo is a simple app that allows you to make quotes for Instagram (as well as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest). You have the option of choosing among 600,000 images or uploading one of your own; adding header, body, and caption text; uploading logos or graphics; and customizing with a filter.
The options are limited, but the interface is extremely streamlined, making it a great choice for beginners. In addition, you can share directly to the social platform of your choosing or use Buffer to schedule the post for a later date.

3. Stencil

Web App, Chrome Extension, Firefox Add-On, Safari Extension, or WordPress

Depending on the plan you choose, Stencil allows you to create quote images with their 140+ common presets, more than 5 million high-resolution photos (all royalty-free), and more than 1275 templates. Even better, Stencil has partnered with Google Fonts and some of the top icon providers to customize your designs even further.

It also helps you determine if you’re within Facebook’s recommended text limits and whether any of your content might be cut off by common social media platforms.

To make sharing easy, you can send your images straight to Instagram, using their in-app social sharing options, or through their native Buffer integration.

4. VanillaPen

Android or iOS

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VanillaPen brands itself as a “powerful tool that will transform your regular posts into creative posters within seconds.” It includes more than 200 templates (with presets to make the design process easier), 86 fonts, and 360 decorative elements. You’ll also have the ability to perform basic design functions such as resizing, rotating, and more. From there, you can export and share to the social media platform of your choice.

5. Fotor

Web App, Mac, Windows, Android, or iOS

Fotor is an excellent tool that offers a wide range of templates, fonts, photos, and stickers to rival any of the apps on this list. However, what makes it stand out is its photo editing and retouching capabilities, making its feature set similar to that of Adobe Photoshop’s but simpler. From background removers to blur effects, Fotor can help you create stunning graphics for Instagram.

6. Snappa

Web App

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With Snappa, you’ll have access to more than 6000 templates and 5 million photos and graphics to use for your designs. It also has basic photo editing capabilities such as background removal, brightness/lightness adjustment, and blurring functionality. You can also repurpose your designs into the ideal image dimensions for multiple social platforms without manually resizing and redesigning for each one. The only downside is that you only get 3 downloads per month on Snappa’s free plan, but there are premium plans available.

7. QuotesCover

Web App

What’s interesting about QuotesCover is that it integrates with a large database of quotes so that you don’t have to supply the text for the image you create. Simply search the database, find a quote, and load it into the QuotesCover editor. From there, it will generate an automatic design, which you can edit with their background options, text formatting tool, stickers, and other design assets. In theory, you can go from zero ideas to full-fledged professional design in just a couple clicks.

8. PicMonkey

Web App, iPhone, Android

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PicMonkey is another one of those tools that can do it all: photo editing (including background removals), graphics, and templates created with the best practices for each social platform in mind. You’ll be able to draw from their library of millions of stock photos, videos, and animations. The big downside to this tool is that you’ll need a subscription to download or share the images you create. However, the plus is that the subscription comes with 1GB of cloud storage (or unlimited storage if you choose one of the premium plans). This allows you to edit on the go, save to the cloud, and access designs on other devices.

9. Word Swag

iOS

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Word Swag helps you create text images that are as edgy as the app’s name sounds. The app uses a special typing engine to create fresh quote designs based on the background picture you’re working with.

Just select (or shoot) your picture, type your quote into the app’s plain text editor, select one of +80 styles, and shuffle through the diverse choices that appear. Word Swag has literally thousands of quote and image options to choose from through a handy integration from Pixabay, a free image gallery.

Keep in mind that the free version places a watermark on the image.

10. Quotes Creator

iOS or Android

Image Source

Quotes Creator has a neat feature that suggests quotes to use — including their attributions — to take the work out of creating an inspirational post for you. We also like how subtly transparent the watermark is to make it as distraction-free as possible. This is another easy-to-use app that creates quotes for Instagram in just a few simple steps — with an easy tap to upload to the platform.

Quotes Creator’s stock background options are a little cheesy, so we recommend finding your own and uploading them or using their library of photos.

11. Quote Maker

iOS

Image Source

Quote Maker is another free app that requires a Pro version to unlock more background and style options, but you can always upload your own background if you feel too limited. You can add neat decals to your brand’s name or a stamp-like effect to a company motto or mission statement.

We recommend exploring the app, but another warning — it can be glitchy if your design and editing actions get more complex. It’s best for simple images, like the one above.

Using an Instagram Post Template for Quotes

The apps above help make quotes for Instagram quickly using templates instead of starting from scratch. When you’re creating content at scale, this can help you reduce the amount of time spent on design and more time focusing on the tasks that matter to you.

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

If you’re a B2B marketer who isn’t investing in content creation, you’re in the minority — 79% of B2B marketers surveyed by Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs said their organization used content marketing to further their goals in 2020.

Developing a sound content marketing strategy is worth it: We found that blogs are among the primary three forms of media used in content strategies today.

In fact, 24% of marketers increased their investment in content marketing last year.

As 2021 is in full swing, we wanted to talk with more B2B content marketers to see what trends they’re looking out for in H2.

1. Content-supported ABM.

According to Brooklin Nash, the head of content at Sales Hacker, “B2B brands are getting better about connecting their ABM plays to content that’s hyper-relevant to the target account.”

For example, Nash says Intricately serves up industry reports with mentions of key accounts.

“ABM ads are starting to point more to content and less to landing pages,” Nash adds.

2. More comprehensive content to support multiple channels.

Nash also reports that he’s seeing companies focus on providing more comprehensive content that supports multiple channels.

“Repurposing content isn’t new, but it definitely seems like there’s been an increase (to the benefit of everyone),” he says. “Instead of a blog post on ABM, you can run a survey and turn it into a downloadable asset, social media images, an article, podcast mentions, and a recap webinar.”

3. Increased reliance on contractors.

Due to the uncertainty of last year, 29% of content marketers had to decrease their budgets.

Additionally, 49% said their organization outsources at least one content marketing activity, with large companies being the most likely to outsource.

Nash noticed the same thing. He says, “I haven’t seen the employment data, but I do know quite a few tech companies that laid off (large) parts of their (large) content teams in the midst of the pandemic.”

That means that bringing those full time functions back will probably take time.

“It’s going to take more time than content demands will allow for, so freelancers need to be ready,” Nash adds.

4. Focusing on original content rather than keywords.

Kelly O’Hara, the founder of Copy Goals, and B2B content marketing specialist, says, “I’ve seen successful bloggers talk about how they don’t optimize some of their content for SEO at all. *Gasp* I know.”

This idea might not be as outrageous as you think on first glance.

O’Hara says this might become the norm in the near future.

“We know that readers are demanding greater authenticity from content,” O’Hara adds. “It’s difficult to be authentic and optimize the heck out of your content at the same time. Plus, I imagine that Google will continue to find ways to give credit to sources that are legit, show their expertise, and genuinely help their readers.”

All that to say, don’t be surprised if content marketers start to focus more on originality rather than keywords, semantically-linked words, getting H2s in the right place, etc.

5. Emphasizing digital marketing.

This might not sound new since the digital revolution has been happening for the last couple of decades, but content marketing itself is just now starting to boom.

This year, there was an increase in those whose organizations used content creation/collaboration/workflow technologies. This isn’t surprising considering the work-from-home world we now live in.

While the type of content (blogs) remained the same, 67% of companies are now focusing on using virtual events, webinars, online courses, and building an online community.

Additionally, the use of livestreaming increased to 29% from 10%.

One of the survey respondents says, “We’ve had to expand out network via digital marketing strategies such as webinars and podcasts, as we relied mostly on in-person events and conferences for brand awareness and networking.”

6. Expanding budgets and expertise.

While there was a decrease in some content marketers budgets in 2020, this year, companies are focusing on increasing expertise with content creation and website enhancements.

Additionally, companies will need to increase their staff to keep up with the demands of the content marketing world.

A survey respondent says, “We’ll be looking to increase staff and ramp up our inbound strategy through content marketing.”

With expanding budgets and growing content marketing teams, companies are becoming more media fluent and are focused on creating a media brand, on top of their company brand.

Content marketing is in the middle of a huge evolution. From focusing on SEO and blogging to becoming a full-scale media company, brands are seeing huge differences when they scale their content marketing efforts.

Instagram is an undeniably powerful tool for businesses.

In fact, 83% of people say they’ve discovered new products or services on Instagram, and roughly 80% say Instagram helps them conduct research on a product and ultimately decide whether or not to make a purchase. 

All of which is to say: If you’re not using Instagram to reach new audiences, increase brand awareness, and ultimately grow sales, then you could be missing out. 

In this post, we’ll review how to make an Instagram business account, and the benefits of having one. Plus, how to switch back-and-forth between a business and personal account.

1. Download the Instagram app.

To get started, you’ll need to download the Instagram app on your phone or go to the Instagram site.

If you don’t already have an Instagram account, you can either download the app and click “Create New Account”, or open the desktop version (www.Instagram.com) and follow the same steps:

2. Sign up.

Next, you’ll fill out the form with your email address (make sure you choose a business email address), company name, username, and password.

You can also sign up with Facebook. If you already have a business Facebook account, this could be a good option.

It’s important to note that your username should most likely be your company name, and your password should follow all recommended guidelines (include a number, special characters, etc.). 

3. Switch to a business account.

Now that you’re set up with a profile, it’s time to switch it to a business account.

To do so, go to your profile and click the three lines in the top right corner:

Then, click “Settings” in the navigation menu that appears: 

Now, click “Account” from the Settings page: 

Finally, click “Switch to Professional Account”: 

When you get to this point, you’ll see another option to switch to a “Creator” account. Creator accounts are meant to be used by influencers, public figures, or content creators.

If you’re a business that sells a product or service, then a business account is the right option.

4. Complete your profile.

At this point, you’re all set up with a business account, but you’re not done yet.

Before you can start promoting your social media, you’ll need to complete your profile:

To do this, choose a profile photo. Your profile image will typically be some variation of your logo so your audience can easily recognize it.

Next, you’ll need to write your bio and fill out your company info. This will include your website, store hours, and contact information.

5. Post some content.

Before you can promote your account, it’s important to post a few images first. Perhaps you can write an introduction or hello post.

When you start interacting with people and following people, they’ll likely visit your account. You want there to be something to see that explains who you are as a company.

6. Link your business Facebook page.

If you didn’t choose to sign up with your business Facebook account, then it’s time to link your account here.

This is an important step because you need to have a Facebook business page to use some of Instagram’s business tools.

To link your account, click the three lines in the top right corner (like you did for step one). Then, click “Settings” and “Business.”

Now, you can click “Connect a Facebook Page”:

It’s important to note — You’ll need to be logged in to Facebook to do this.

7. Start following people.

Your profile is essentially ready to go. To get started on Instagram, invite your Facebook followers to follow you on Instagram.

You should also start following people to get the ball rolling. However, make sure that you’re strategic. The people you follow should make sense for your brand.

8. Develop a strategy.

Starting your Instagram business account is just the beginning. Once you’re all set with your page, it’s time to learn how to use Instagram for marketing.

You’ll want to think about the hashtags you’ll use, the accounts you’ll target, and who you’ll engage with.

To get started, you can learn how to use Instagram for marketing with HubSpot Academy’s Instagram Marketing Course.

Now, what if you have a creator account and you want to switch to a business account? Or what if you have a business account that you want to switch to personal? Or perhaps you have a personal account you want to switch to business?

To do this, follow the steps below.

1. Go to your profile.

The first step to switch your account is to go to your profile.

2. Tap the Settings cog.

Next, click the three lines in the top right corner … 

… Then, click “Settings”:

3. Click Account & Switch to Business Profile.

Now, click “Account” and then “Switch to business profile.” If you’re a business page and want to switch to a personal account, this button will become “Switch to personal account.”

No matter what account you have or what you want to switch it to, this is the process to go through.

Interestingly, you can also do this by just clicking on your profile, and clicking “Edit Profile.”

At this point, you might be wondering, “Why do I need a business account?” Below, let’s review some of the top benefits of having a business account on Instagram.

1. Action buttons.

With an Instagram business account you can add action buttons to your profile, such as “Book an Appointment,” “Make a Reservation,” or “Get Tickets” depending on your needs.

In fact, plenty of scheduling software integrates with Instagram, so you can attach your Instagram business account to your scheduling software.

Additionally, you can add CTAs on your profile, including “Call” or “Email” so it’s easier for your audience to get in touch with you.

2. Auto-scheduling posts.

A major perk of having a business account is the ability to schedule posts in advance. This is helpful because you can implement and execute your strategy without needing to spend every day on the app.

3. Access to analytics.

With a business profile, you’ll gain access to insights about your followers. You can see a demographic breakdown and how your audience interacts with your posts.

4. Ability to manage ads.

This is one of the best features of Instagram business accounts.

You’ll be able to promote posts and can easily select your audience, set a budget, and get rolling with advertising.

You can even work with influencers by directly promoting their branded content (if you’re tagged as a business partner).

To get more in depth, your Facebook account will need to be linked so you can use the Facebook ad’s manager.

5. Swipe up feature.

Another great feature of a business account is the ability to include swipe up links if you have more than 10,000 followers.

Since Instagram is one of the only platforms where you can’t include any clickable links in your posts, this is an excellent way to get your content out there.

Getting started with Instagram marketing can be hugely beneficial for your company. And it’s even an easy process. If you aren’t sure where to get started, we suggest taking free courses on Instagram Marketing (like HubSpot’s).

If you want to drive organic traffic to your website, you must understand two critical aspects of SEO strategy:

• Relevance
• Authority

With relevance, the key is knowing what your audience is searching for and providing the highest quality and most relevant content so it’s a no-brainer for Google to serve it up to them.

But this isn’t an exact science.

You could create the best content out there from your perspective, but it’s a competitive landscape, and Google takes myriad other factors into account when ranking pages on the SERPs. One of those being… how authoritative (or trustworthy) the provider of that content is.

You might think that “authority” is subjective, but Google has one critical way to measure it: backlinks.

Why are backlinks important?

While there are 200 known Google ranking factors, backlinks counts as one of the most important for Google search.

That’s because a link to another website is more than just a link — it’s a vote of confidence, a recommendation, a way for publishers to say to their readers: “Here’s a source I trust. Go check it out yourself.”

It’s incredibly difficult to get that kind of endorsement, especially for small businesses or startups. But if you want to boost your SEO performance, you need to make sure you consistently earn high-quality backlinks to your website, better and faster than your competition.

Additionally, Gabi Theard, Director of Marketing at Trujay, says, “A link building strategy doesn’t just increase your SEO score and visibility on Google. It also shows readers where your company falls in relations to other brands — and reminds readers that there is, in fact, a human behind the screen. Backlinks can demonstrate a relationship between two sites and how each site is working to help the other grow.”

“Plus, backlinks help readers get the highest degree of information that answers their questions.”

High-Quality Backlinks

Keep in mind, though, that not all backlinks are created equal. If you think of a backlink as a vote of confidence, it only makes sense to also evaluate the credibility of that vote.

In the past, tactics such as link farms, PBNs, and comment spam allowed black-hat SEOs to create vast backlink profiles and successfully game the system. However, these black-hat link-building techniques no longer work because Google has gotten savvy to them. In fact, too many “unnatural” links may even earn your site a penalty.

In other words, quality matters just as much as quantity when it comes to backlinks.

Earning high-quality backlinks is probably the most challenging part of SEO. You’ll want links that are:

• Authoritative – The site has an authoritative backlink profile (many votes of confidence), generates a lot of traffic, and even ranks well in the SERPs itself. In addition, .gov and .edu sites tend to carry more weight, as do industry-leading sites.
• Relevant – The referring page tackles a similar topic or niche. e.g. If your technology company’s homepage gets a backlink from a blog post on “how to golf,” this would not be seen as a relevant or quality backlink.
• Unique – You will get an edge if the site refers to you but does not refer to your competitors. Otherwise, the backlink may be good to have, but it’s table stakes.
• Natural – The link is not sponsored, the anchor text is not branded or spammy, and the referring page has a natural number of links on it.

As an SEO strategist specifically focusing on link building at HubSpot, I’m no stranger to the challenge of finding high-quality sources that will link back to your site. To help you improve your company’s SEO ranking, I’ve cultivated this list of creative and unique ways to earn backlinks.

1. Reclaim Unlinked Mentions

Reclaiming unlinked brand mentions is probably the easiest, quickest way to build high-quality backlinks.

All you need to do is keep an eye on who is mentioning your brand, on blogs or in the news. You can do that using something as simple (and free) as Google Alerts. If you want more insights into your mentions, like the number of shares or the domain authority of the website where the mention comes from, you can opt for tools like BuzzSumo, Ahrefs Content Explorer or Mention.

Image Source

Oftentimes, you’ll notice the author hasn’t included a link back to your website when they mention your brand, product, or service. That’s when you can send them a quick note, asking for a proper link attribution. This also allows the publisher to give their readers a better experience, letting them click through and learn more about the brand mentioned. It’s a win, win.

The creative part of this tactic is that you can use the same method to reclaim links for other mentions that are related to your brand — including events you organize, employees names, research reports, etc.

For example, you can keep a lookout for interviews that feature your company’s executives and ask for a link back to their profile page on your website. Or, you can look for mentions of reports or statistics you’ve published, and ask for a proper link attribution to the original source.

2. Get Contextual Links

Have you noticed how some articles feature additional resources, either recommended in text or inside a “Read more” section?

Here’s an example of a “read more” section from SEJ, where they link to a related piece:

These links embedded in the text of an article are called contextual links.

The key to getting contextual links is to find the right link prospect to reach out to. You can find them by researching articles that are related to the content you’re promoting and already have a “Read more” section.

For instance, let’s say you have a new study on email marketing. Try looking for articles that speak about marketing trends and recommend other articles.

Here’s how to find them using search engines like Google:

• marketing trends inurl:blog intext:”Read more”
• marketing trends inurl:blog intext:”Recommended articles”
• marketing trends inurl:blog intext:”Recommended reading”

When you reach out to the author to pitch your study, don’t forget to mention why your content is worth getting featured. A persuasive boilerplate and a personalized email will go a long way.

Additionally, Theard says: “Once you get into the habit of earning backlinks, you may start to notice that other publishers come to you directly. With the right relationship-building strategy, publishers come to you rather than you inquiring to them.”

She adds, “Relationship-based backlinks are critical, as opposed to simple (and frequent) link exchanges. Google can, and will, pick up on backlink publications that are whimsy; a backlink for a backlink is not a good backlink. A relationship-based backlink is accepted by Google through relevant keywords, the credibility of websites, and genuine effort to have website referrals be at the top of calibers.”

3. Get “Best X” List Mentions

Today’s consumers look for all available options before making a purchasing decision. They often use comparison websites or articles, like “The 13 Best Free Email Marketing Tools in 2021” to see what others recommend.

To get a sense of how popular these Best X articles are in your industry, use a keyword research tool and check for monthly search volume. For instance, there are more than 3,400 searches per month for the query “best CRM for small businesses” (according to data from Ahrefs).

Getting mentioned on articles that list the best products like the one you offer is a fantastic way to reinforce your brand, get more people to try out your product and, of course, earn high-quality backlinks.

Alex Birkett, Senior Growth Marketing Manager at HubSpot, explains why getting featured on these lists is so important for your business: “If you look at these search results in terms of pure click-through rate, there’s an upper limit on how much traffic you can bring to your own product page by ranking on your own site’s listicle.”

Birkett continues to say — “As Nick Eubanks has mentioned, if you can broaden your view from trying to rank #1 to trying to monopolize all of the sites on the first page of a search query, you can multiply the amount of click-throughs to your site, your website traffic, and, down the line, your sales volume. And that’s not even factoring in the less trackable aspects, such as social proof and brand awareness.”

“In other words, this tactic goes beyond just link building and taps into acquisition and brand awareness potential, too.”

To get your product or service included in a list round-up, start with a simple Google search to find high-ranking blogs that write about your product or industry.

Here are some useful search terms to help you find relevant prospects:

• Best [X]
• Best [X] for [Y] e.g. Best CRM for entrepreneurs
• Top [X]
• Top [X] for [Y] e.g. Top 10 CRM for small businesses

Collect the most relevant prospects in a list and prioritize them based on domain authority (or Domain Rating if you’re using Ahrefs), backlink profile, ranking, and referral traffic potential.

Once your final list is ready, write a short pitch for the author to show them why your product or service deserves to be included in their list.

As per any outreach campaign, a short, persuasive pitch and a customized email will help you stand out.

4. Become a Source for Other Publishers

By using your expertise and unique data, you can become a source for other bloggers and journalists.

Every time someone quotes you, you’ll earn a backlink. But high-domain authority backlinks aren’t the only benefit of this tactic (although they are a huge benefit on their own). By becoming a trusted source, you’ll also increase your brand awareness and drive referral traffic to your website.

Best of all, it isn’t as difficult as you may think.

To start, simply subscribe to HARO (Help A Reporter Out). This is a free service that connects expert sources (like yourself) with bloggers and journalists who are looking for contributors.

Here’s how it works — every day, HARO will send you an email with queries from writers in your industry. You can pick the ones that resonate with your business and respond via email, including your credentials.

Speed is very important here, as most of these writers get many submissions. If you’re among the first to respond, you have a bigger chance to be seen and selected for the final piece. If you’re selected, you’ll likely receive an email from a journalist or blogger letting you know the article is live.

For instance, here’s an email I got a few days after I submitted a quote on HARO:

From my experience with HARO, it takes about four weeks for an article to get published after you send your response. Even if you don’t receive a follow-up email from the writer, keep an eye on the publication to see if your quote ends up making it into the piece.

I found that, on average, two out of 10 answers get picked up. That isn’t too bad, but if you’re like me, you don’t want to waste those eight other answers that don’t get to be published.

To ensure you still use those quotes elsewhere, I suggest you create a backlog of content and use it to answer similar questions on Quora, LinkedIn, or even your own blog or social channels.

5. Reach Out to Journalists

Bloggers and journalists are bombarded with emails pitching them information that is too promotional and doesn’t add value to their readers. That’s why many outreach emails don’t get any responses.

However, there are effective methods to make your pitch stand out. Paddy Moogan, Co-Founder of Aira, explains how his team uses this tactic successfully to earn high-quality backlinks for their clients:

“We take an individual from a client’s company, usually the founder, Managing Director, or CEO (although it can be anyone, really) and get them to provide us with their views and opinions on a set of topics.

These topics should be a sweet spot between what their company is credible to talk about, and general newsworthy topics. Classic examples at the moment are things such as what Brexit means for the X industry or what the future of X industry is in the world of AI or automation.

These broader topics are being talked about a lot in the press, so tying it to a topic that your client can talk about allows you to approach journalists and offer their comments for any upcoming articles. They often link to you because of this, and will also often link to profile pages on your client’s website, as well.”

Jeff Previte, Content Manager at Bluleadz, also shared with me a tip on how their agency stands out when pitching journalists: “When we conduct outreach for new link building opportunities, we like to use HubSpot video in our emails. We record a short video introducing ourselves and our company. After the introduction, we briefly explain how our content can deliver value to their audience and make some suggestions of what they can link to. This lends a human element. Most link building outreach comes from cold email templates. With a video, we give recipients a name, a face, and a voice they can associate with our company. That small touch helps us stand out.”

6. Update Old Content

If you find an article or a research report that hasn’t been updated in a while, check how many backlinks the piece has. If there are many publications referencing that content, then you found yourself a real gem.

You can simply go ahead and create a better, fresh piece, with more relevant data.

Once the content is live, you can then reach out to bloggers or journalists who’ve linked to the old content to let them know about your updated version.

Oftentimes, you’ll see the results of your outreach in a matter of days or weeks in the form of backlinks or social media shares. But there are also other benefits that come out of building that relationship in the first place. For instance, you might end up collaborating on other projects that can help you grow your brand, and your traffic.

Ultimately, when building your email outreach list, have a long-term benefit in mind and try building a relationship — instead of just focusing on the backlink.

7. Build Free Tools

Creating free tools, like calculators or template generators, is an effective method for earning links and even generating new leads.

In a nutshell, here’s how to get started:

1. Start with keyword research and see what comes up for “templates”, “tools”, or “generator” in your industry.
2. Check out what tools appear in Top 10 search results for those keywords.
3. Try to figure out which tool or generator receives the most backlinks right now.
4. Build something similar but way better, e.g. better design, more customizable options, etc.

For example, take HubSpot’s Email Signature Generator. There are over 29,000 searches for “signature generator” on any given month on Google, and our tool offers a very simple, aesthetically-pleasing solution.

Since we launched it, it’s been highly used and recommended, having earned over 5,520 backlinks from 1,168 referring domains.

8. Publish Ultimate Guides

An Ultimate Guide is a piece of content designed to be the best, most comprehensive resource on a given topic. It covers enough information that you don’t need to go elsewhere to learn more about that subject.

Here are two examples from our own blog:

• The Ultimate Guide to Video Marketing
• The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing

The reason why these Ultimate Guides attract inbound backlinks is because they help bloggers and journalists reference a concept they mention.

For instance, if someone writes an article titled “How to get started with SEO”, they can focus on a few tips and tactics without explaining, in-depth, what SEO is — instead, they can simply link to an SEO Ultimate Guide, if their readers have further questions.

Here’s an example:

Image Source

Alex Birkett, Senior Growth Marketing Manager at HubSpot, uses this approach with his personal blog, as well. Here’s how he explains it: “An Ultimate Guide doesn’t have to explicitly tell you it is an Ultimate Guide. It simply has to go above-and-beyond in its utility or perceived value.”

“For example,” Birkett continues, “I recently wrote a 6,500 word guide on A/B testing. It ranges from beginner issues all the way through advanced topics and fringe cases. Basically, it’s a bookmarkable article for anyone who runs A/B tests. Not only did it get a really solid initial spike of traffic from social shares, but it consistently gains organic links month-by-month.”

9. Use Images to Earn Links & Mentions

Infographics are probably the most common visual asset used to earn backlinks. It’s always good to experiment with them, if you haven’t done it before.

However, if you feel infographics don’t work well for your brand, here are a few other visuals you might consider creating:

• Charts and graphs with original data
• Diagrams to visually explain complex concepts
• One-page templates
• Free photo galleries for others to use

To give you an idea of how other brands use free photo galleries, check out this creative campaign from LinkedIn: The Real Face of Sales. The brand has created a free downloadable library of photos that feature real, non-cliche salespeople.

The photos are also available on Unsplash and Pexels (where they got over 35 million views), which helped with distribution.

10. Use Directories (yes, Directories!)

Despite what you may have heard, directories aren’t dead. In fact, they are probably one of the best ways to improve your local SEO and help potential customers find your business.

Of course, I’m not talking about spammy directories that are there just for the sake of links. Those are more likely to harm your SEO performance than anything else.

The directories you need to be on are the ones people actually use — like Google My Business, Yelp, and TripAdvisor. Beyond these famous ones, there are many other general and niche directories that can help your rankings and traffic.

Here are a few resources to help you find relevant directories:

• 21 Web Directories That Still Have Value (Search Engine Journal)
• Top Local Citations by Business Category (BrightLocal)
• The Ultimate List: 57 Online Local Business Directories (HubSpot)
• 600+ Directory Sites and How To Do Directory Link Building (Linkio)

11. Use the Broken Link Building Method

This tactic involves reaching out to a website that has a broken outbound link (a link to an external source) and suggest they update it with a link to one of your pages. Of course, your page has to be a good resource on the topic to which they were originally linking, so it makes sense to swap the broken link with yours.

The reason this tactic works so well is because it’s adding a ton of value to the webmasters — it helps them fix an error on their website and it improves the experience for their readers.

The challenge with this tactic is, of course, finding these broken links.

You have a couple of options here:

1. You can look for websites with broken links and find relevant resources on your website that you might suggest in its place.
2. You can look for one dead page (404) that used to get a ton of links, recreate that article or offer with better, more relevant content, and then reach out to those who linked to the initial piece.

Either way, you’ll need a good SEO tool to help you identify broken links. You can try Siteliner, which is free if you have under 250 pages to review, or Ahrefs, which also published a guide on how to use the broken link building method using their tool.

Once you identify the target websites and have your content ready, you can start working on your outreach. Make sure to keep your email short and sweet and focus on being helpful, rather than just getting a backlink.

Make Sure You Have The Right Backlink Checkers in Your SEO Toolbox

Now that you have a list of tactics to try out in your next link building campaign, it’s time to make sure you also have the tools you need to succeed.

Because there are so many options out there, I thought I’d end this article with a list of my top free, tried-and-tested backlinks checkers.

To make it easier for you to pick the right tool for your next project, I went ahead and tested each tool to see how many backlinks they can find, as well as other unique features they each offer.

I used our domain (www.hubspot.com) to test the capabilities of each tool and here’s what I found:

1. Ahrefs Backlink Checker

With the second most active crawler besides Google, Ahrefs has the most comprehensive backlink database, giving you up-to-date data. In the free version of the tool, Ahrefs shows you Top 100 backlinks, Top 5 anchors, and Top 5 pages. That’s enough to get a birds-eye view of your website’s backlinks.

If you’d like to get into more details, the paid version offers far more extensive data and access to other tools that might be useful in a link building campaign, like Content Explorer or Broken Outbound links, to name a few.

2. Backlinks by Neil Patel

It may not pick up as many backlinks or referring domains as Ahrefs, but this tool gives a lot of value in the free version. For one, you can export to CSV up to 5,000 backlinks and see the Source Page Title, URL, and anchor text. You can also filter the view by including or excluding domains, anchors or zones (.es, .de etc.). All in all, I’d definitely recommend checking out this free tool.

3. MonitorBacklinks

MonitorBacklinks picks up almost as many referring domains as Ahrefs. Additionally, what’s unique about MonitorBacklinks is that it offers details on the top backlinks that you can see based on Trust Flow or Citation Flow. However, to access more of their database, you need to switch to their paid version.

4. OpenLinkProfiler

OpenLinkProfiler is a great tool for analyzing your backlink profile. The downside is that their database of links is fairly limited compared to Ahrefs or MonitorBacklinks. Still, there’s a lot of insights you can gain (for free) by filtering the available backlinks by categories such as industry, TLDs, anchors, or LIS (Link Influence Score). That’s something I haven’t seen in other free tools.

This tool also provides charts to show you which pages get the most links, or which countries link most to your website.

5. RankWatch

RankWatch has a great Dashboard feature where you can visualize your backlink profile. Among other things, you can see your link acquisition trend for the past three months, referring domains acquisition, and anchor distribution. The overall summary charts are available for free. However, if you want to see the exact list of backlinks or referring domains you’ve earned, you need to switch to the paid version.

6. CognitiveSEO

CognitiveSEO is great for getting an overall view of the total backlinks and referring domains — and, most importantly, checking your link velocity. You can see the link acquisition trend for the past 6 months for free, even without creating an account. Another interesting visual report is the Top 5 website pages, where you can see how your website performs by backlinks or referral domains.

All of the above tools provide valuable insights that can help you get started with link building. They all give a macro view on your backlink profile, but each one comes with different additional information. Try them out and see which one is best for you.

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

I care about customers. Whether they’re your customers, my customers, or my customers’ customers, I want every one of them to have a good experience every time they pick up the phone to call a business, open a marketing email, or visit a website.

It’s what gets me going every morning. That’s why I was thrilled in 2019 when I had the opportunity to launch HubSpot’s first-ever ‘voice of the customer’ team.

I assembled a group of passionate people, each more dedicated than the last to improving customer experience. We met weekly, talked about our customers, forensically analyzed feedback, and dug deep into the weeds to see where we could root out friction.

And then one day it hit us. The answers to most of our questions didn’t lie in more cross-functional meetings, increased headcount, or longer hours for support staff. The answers to our questions lay in operations.

Operations teams carry the responsibility for making sure that, well, everything works. If a marketer is having trouble segmenting a contact list, they reach out to operations. If a salesperson’s automated emails are misfiring, operations gets tagged in. If a service professional can’t access a customer’s communication history, it’s operations to the rescue again.

They’re the people who set every customer-facing team up for success. As such, they are the orchestrators of the customer experience. And yet, most companies view operations as a reactive function whose sole purpose is to frantically find fixes to issues as they arise.

It’s time for us as an industry to re-imagine operations and transform these teams from reactive fire-fighters into proactive friction-fighters. How can we do this? With revenue operations (RevOps).

It’s my firm belief that operations teams can only fulfill their potential when they work together under a unified RevOps strategy and are equipped with the right tools to execute that strategy.

Today, HubSpot is spearheading the onrushing RevOps revolution with the launch of Operations Hub — a new product specifically designed to empower operations teams to play an influential role in helping their companies delight customers at scale.

Because when a company scales, friction inevitably emerges, and customer experience is often the first thing to suffer.

Three Reasons Why Customer Experience Often Suffers When a Company Scales

There are few companies out there that impress me so much, I feel compelled to tweet about my experience, tell my friends, or write a positive review. These days, customers like me expect their interactions with every company to be quick, convenient, and contextual.

When a company scales and begins to achieve exponential growth, the challenge of keeping pace with customer expectations grows exponentially, too. There are three key reasons why:

1. More customers to support.

When a company is in startup mode, it will usually keep up with the growth of its customer base by increasing investments in staff. When customer growth starts to outpace the company’s ability to maintain a high standard of customer experience, it will likely raise capital and hire new employees to support the expanding demand. This works … for a while.

When that company is ready to scale – that is, to grow its business faster than its investments – it needs to support a growing customer base without simply hiring more employees and without letting the quality of the customer experience drop. To do this, it has to reinvent its approach to delighting customers or risk losing the trust of its user base – and its market share.

2. More tools to manage.

As a company grows, it will inevitably encounter new challenges. And in a world of over 8,000 martech solutions, there is no shortage of tools out there that could be brought in to help solve a problem quickly. So, it’s common for different teams to adopt different tools to help them solve different problems.

Over time, this approach results in a brutally bloated tech stack that takes so much time and energy to manage, there’s little left to dedicate to customers. What’s more, when tech stacks are unnecessarily complex, it becomes increasingly difficult for customer-facing teams to access reliable data, making it nearly impossible to deliver the type of contextual experience customers expect.

3. More touchpoints to maintain.

When a company is getting off the ground, it will tend to focus on a small number of high-impact channels. For example, its early social media marketing strategy may focus exclusively on, say, Facebook and Twitter, and it might only take customer queries over the phone.

As that company seeks to scale, however, it will add new channels to its marketing mix and offer its customers more ways to get in touch. Pretty soon, it’ll find itself interacting with its audience not only on Facebook, Twitter, and over the phone, but on Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and via 24/7 web chat, too.

To manage this multitude of touchpoints, that company will need a new strategy to ensure it maintains the quality of experience it offered to customers when there were only a few channels in play.

These three issues are a by-product of scale. They are challenges a company wants to have … and solve. Yet, most businesses fall short. They naturally fall back on the methods that have helped them reach this critical moment in their journey — many continue to frantically hire staff long after it’s sustainable to do so, some rush to tack more tools onto their tech stacks without the infrastructure to make them all work together, and others simply leave certain touchpoints unattended, leaving customers unimpressed.

Operations professionals are uniquely positioned to help a company solve challenges like these. But historically, companies across our industry have failed to recognize the potential of their operations teams, leaving them stuck in silos and asking them to solve issues without the right tools or team structure to do so effectively.

Moving From Function-Out To Customer-In

Operations professionals are rarely among the first hires a company makes. They tend to be brought in only when systems start to creak and the friction between teams becomes unbearable. A company’s marketing leader might hire an operations professional onto their team to help improve its lead scoring system, while its head of sales brings in their own operations hire to work on reporting.

Before long, there are multiple operations teams working in different departmental silos, often out of different operating systems. In this setup, even if each operations team does an exceptionally good job at fighting friction within their department, friction can still be rife between their departments.

For example, the sales team might be having difficulty accessing and understanding the marketing team’s data, hurting their ability to personalize their outreach based on a prospect’s recent engagement.

With no team accountable for overseeing this critical cross-departmental touchpoint, prospects will continue to receive impersonal emails, the marketing team will continue to receive exasperated messages from their sales colleagues, and the sales team will continue to struggle to win over prospects.

I call this a “function-out” perspective, where each customer-facing team is only focused on the portion of the customer experience they’re directly responsible for, and each operations professional is tasked with supporting their designated function.

What companies need instead is a “customer-in” perspective, where all teams work in unison, informed by a holistic view of the customer, to deliver a unified experience. Operations professionals have a critical role to play in driving this shift in perspective. But to be successful, they too need to be unified.

How RevOps Helps Companies Scale Customer Experience

One of the most powerful things a company can do to scale its customer experience is to unify its functional operations professionals under one centralized revenue operations (RevOps) strategy.

When operations teams are unified, they are not serving their separate teams’ goals, they are serving the customer. They work with the same data, which gives them a single source of truth on what’s really going on with customers at a holistic level.

They collaborate on cross-functional processes that allow them to bridge the gaps between teams where friction frequently festers. And perhaps most importantly, they work together to proactively identify issues before they have a chance to hurt the customer experience.

Companies that don’t yet have a large number of operations professionals among their ranks don’t have to wait until they do to start adopting a “customer-in” perspective. If they haven’t hired an operations professional yet, they should consider bringing one in as a priority and giving them a meaningful say in how all customer-facing teams work together, not just one.

They should also examine the ways their internal teams are set up within their current operating model, assess whether the systems they’re using are contributing to silos, and begin to instill a culture of alignment around the customer.

After all, RevOps is not just the name of a team, it’s a philosophy by which to run a company — one that thrives when operations teams are equipped with the right tools.

Introducing Operations Hub

Today with the launch of Operations Hub, we are giving operations teams a suite of tools that allow them to assume their rightful place at the forefront of the customer experience and empower them to guide their companies through the customer experience challenges that come with scale.

With Operations Hub, teams can sync data across their business apps bi-directionally and in real-time, allowing them to manage a tech stack with ease, no matter how complex it is.

They can roll out workflows that automatically keep their database clean and up to date, helping them to maintain a reliable view of the customer, no matter how many touchpoints they manage. And they can design sophisticated custom automation actions to deliver a deeply personalized and contextual experience to customers, no matter how large their customer base grows.

Together, these tools free up operations teams to conduct bold ambitious experiments, test big innovative ideas, and launch ground-breaking new strategies, all in the name of delivering an exceptional customer experience. For too long our industry has put a limit on the potential of operations professionals. That changes today.

Back in 2019, I had the opportunity to launch HubSpot’s ‘voice of the customer’ team. That experience opened my eyes to the vital role operations teams have to play in scaling customer experience.

At the beginning of 2021, I had the opportunity to launch another team at HubSpot: the revenue operations team. With Operations Hub at our fingertips and our operations professionals unified as one, we are on a mission to elevate the role of operations teams not only at our company, but across the entire industry.

If you work in operations like me, you have a right to feel excited. Where you were once reactive, you can now be proactive. Where you were once siloed, you can now be in sync with your operations teammates. And where you were once an afterthought of the customer-facing teams you support, you can now be the orchestrator of your company’s customer experience strategy.

Traffic is a low-impact word for most people but a high-impact word for marketers. Traffic can ultimately dictate success, whether it’s the number of leads that come to your website, visit your social channels, or watch your videos.

There are two different types of traffic you can have, organic and non-organic, that can come from all over: email, social media, organic searches, backlinks — the list goes on.

Non-organic traffic can be a bit harder to come by, which is why, when creating non-organic content, you want to ensure that it will drive results. However, it’s easier said than done when it comes to figuring out what works for your business. In this post, hear from HubSpot content strategists and marketers about the types of content that bring in the most non-organic traffic as inspiration for creating your own.

4 Content Types That Get Non-Organic Traffic, According to Content Strategists

Data-Driven Content

Pam Bump, Audience Growth Marketing Manager & Staff Writer for the HubSpot Blogs, says that she often sees solid non-organic traffic from email and social media to blog posts that feature statistics or recent industry figures. Bump says, “People love to share, link to, or read up on new data that impacts their career, industry, or lives in some way.

The data-driven content you share can be related to overall industry trends, stat roundup posts (like this one), and data comparison pieces, like this one about Millenials vs. Gen Z, written by Bump herself.

If you have the means, it’s worth considering running internal experiments and publishing your own original data. This can help you drive referrals and backlinks from other websites as non-organic leads and build your domain authority. When HubSpot does this, Bump says, “A credible website might include our data and say ‘according to Hubspot,’ and link to our original data post because it simply has information readers can’t get anywhere else.”

Content Featuring Quotes and Interviews

In the same vein as data-driven content, people want to learn something from what you have to offer, especially if they’re learning it from experienced industry leaders and professionals.

Bump gives a piece titled Marketing Trends to Watch in 2021, According to 21 Experts, as an example. It was written by MOZ CMO Christina Mautz, and she included quotes from reputable industry leaders. The piece was shared on HubSpot social channels and emails and has since received a significant amount of views from non-organic sources in just three months.

When you create content like this, the industry leaders you feature in the piece may share the posts with their audiences, helping you gain brand awareness and traffic from additional sources. Francesca McCaffrey, Tech Content Strategies, notes that leadership-type content brings in significant non-organic traffic for the HubSpot Product Blog, especially when shared on social media. She says, “Leadership thought pieces are also a significant source of non-organic traffic for us, as they tend to inspire lots of commentary and clicks on networking sites like LinkedIn.”

Emerging Trends

Making an effort to create content about emerging industry-related trends can do wonders in terms of attracting email, social media, and referral traffic.

Bump wrote a post about Clubhouse, a relatively new social platform that didn’t have high MSV search terms affiliated with it yet. Bump added headlines to the content that would gain traction when the app got bigger, like “What Is Clubhouse?” Since publication, the post has earned an impressive amount of non-organic views and, as expected, has picked up organic traffic as the app grows in popularity.

Covering emerging trends also helps you stay on top of new keywords that aren’t as competitive. If you’re one of the only sources creating content for the keywords, search engines will recognize you as a source of authority when the trend becomes more popular.

Technical Guides and How-Tos

McCaffrey says that technical guides and how-to type content from the Product Blog submitted to reputable industry sites perform especially well with non-organic traffic.

She gives this piece as an example that was submitted to Hacker News, a reputable cybersecurity publication. McCaffrey says, “Making it to the first or second page of a site like Hacker News can really boost non-organic traffic, and translate into organic traffic over time. The piece made it to the front page, driving thousands of viewers to that post in a day.”

Like pieces containing quotes and interviews, this type of content performs well because people can learn from it; they can take away actionable skills to apply to their own lives.

All in all, the content you choose to create should directly relate to your business, as you’ll find the most success if you’re creating content your audience is already looking for.

However, it’s worth considering purposely creating content that you know has the potential to bring in a significant amount of non-organic traffic. Leverage these tips from expert HubSpot content strategists, and begin creating content that drives traffic.