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The number 1 mistake made by businesses, entrepreneurs and marketers on social media is...

...trying to manage too many different networks.

Before I dive into the reasons behind this, ask yourself:
Is it better for your business to reach 100% of its marketing potential on 1 (or 2) marketing channels, or 15% on many?
There will be split answers to this question, but I firmly stand in the 100% on 1 (or 2) channels corner.

The social media strategy that has been so successful for me (with respect to content), us as an agency and our clients, is to focus on quality over quantity...

...and this doesn't only relate to the number of pieces of content we create or the amount of posts with publish, it stretches across everything- including social media channels.

If you were to look at this strategy like a commanding general in battle, it would read something like this:

1. Find: Discover the most suitable and relevant place to attack

2. Analyse: Figure out how you're going to win in that area

3. Attack: Follow through with your plan!

4. Optimise: See what's winning and build on it. Drop the losing tactics.

5. Keep attacking: Implement your optimisation tactics.

6. Conquer: Achieve your goals, win your battle

7. Expand: Take the proof of your victory and use it to help you expand into the next key area of battle

The key strength and the reason this has worked so well for us, is that it focusses 100% on just 1 or 2 social networks, allowing us to work actively and outwardly, rather than reactively and inwardly.

In essence, we're able to go out onto these networks and do work, rather than wait for people to find us (and engage with our profiles). This means a deep understanding of the network (and our target audience's behaviour on it), high-quality targeted content and posts, constant analysis of competitors (and the tactics that win or lose for them) and high levels of engagement.

Like I said, 100% effort.

How Many Social Networks Should You Focus On?

The bigger your team (and the more people you can dedicate to social media marketing) the more channels you can conquer at once.

At the time of writing, Einstein Marketer has 2 different social networks in the 5 digit follower category (10,000's) and 3 networks in the 4 digit category (1,000's). But that's because we have people dedicated to social media marketing, who work to increase our reach (as well as our clients') and a team committed to creating quality content.

BTW: Einstein Marketer only started creating content and using social channels in 2018.

If you're a one man (or woman) band, working in a small team or are just getting started on your business journey, I'm not suggesting that you can't handle the rigours of 5 or 6 different networks. I'm telling you- as a fact- that you won't be able to do your brand justice on ANY of those channels.

Looking back at the war analogy (above), when you've achieved your goals (e.g. 50,000 engaged followers) on one channel, you can use this as social proof to actively move onto another channel and conquer that (whilst still maintaining the channel you have complete control over).

As a general rule, I'd suggest no more than 2 networks per dedicated social media marketer (if you're working alone, by default, you are the business' social media marketer).

In today's marketing world, quality will always beat quantity. That means focussing on channels and content that drive engaged followers, who share your content and promote your brand.

Which Social Networks Should Your Business Focus On?

Unfortunately, without knowing your industry, brand or target market, I can't tell you the perfect networks for your brand...

...but in the remainder of this post, I'm going to analyse the world's biggest social networks, so you can come to an informed decision without any other external guidance.

And remember, if there are multiple (3+) networks that sound like they'd fit your brand's social aims, but you don't have the man power to realise your potential on all of them, ONLY pick the 1 (or 2) that are most relevant!
These social networks are ordered by Monthly Active Users. This is not the total number of users on each platform, it is the number of people who login at least once a month.
Number of MAU's (monthly active users):
2.32 Billion
What industries are most successful on this social network?
All of them!
What makes it stand apart from the rest?
Its enormous number of users and its value as an advertising platform.
What are the demographics of their core users?

Everyone! Nearly anyone who uses social media, has a Facebook account.

So far, you might've noticed that I keep referring to using '1 (or 2) social media channels'. The reason I keep saying '1 (or 2)' is purely because of .

As the world's largest social network it simply can't be ignored. With over 2 Billion monthly active users (more than a quarter of the world's population), no matter what your industry, target market or business aims, you can find and achieve them on this network.

Facebook is the only network that I would say every business must-have, because from a marketing standpoint there are just too many things going for it.

Aside from being a place that your target market definitely visits (at least once a month), Facebook allows you to create huge social proof (by page likes, followers and engagement), use any form of content (written, visual, audio, video), create 'Stories' and constantly reach new audiences.

In addition to all this, Facebook is the best social network for advertising. Their business platform allows anybody to target specific niche audiences (down to the finest details), track user behaviour from ads, perform split-tests, discover more about people who interact with their ads, target people who are more likely to purchase, create 'lookalike' audiences of people with similar interest and loads more...

...but the best thing about Facebook ads is that brands can have huge success by starting on tiny budgets.

Whatever your aims online, I strongly recommend that you focus your attention on Facebook.

Number of MAU's (monthly active users):
1.9 Billion
What industries are most successful on this social network?
Another huge network, with a broad and immensely varied usership. Similar to Facebook, YouTube can work for almost any industry
What makes it stand apart from the rest?
The world's second most popular search engine. The home of video on the internet.
What are the demographics of their core users?
Again....everyone! Particularly popular with 18-34 year olds.
People tune in to watch over a billion hours of video on every day!

And although it isn't strictly considered a social network (more of a video sharing website)...

...because it allows users to create a profile and then comment, share and like content, it makes our list.

Video is taking over in the content world and continues to go from strength to strength in terms of viewers, engagement and popularity. And if video is your thing (which it definitely should be) YouTube is the best place to host your videos and grow your following.

Their huge user base (almost 2 Billion monthly active users) is still growing, making it one of the most visited websites in the world.

On top of this, their search engine is thought to be the second most used on the internet (after their owners', Google) so if you are planning to market your brand on this channel, it is well worth researching and implementing YouTube SEO strategies.

YouTube also run very engaging placements for adverts, allowing brands to advertise at the start of relevant videos, retarget users (by their previous behaviour online) and drive new subscribers to their channels.

If video content is at the centre of your marketing strategy, YouTube is probably the place for you.

Number of MAU's (monthly active users):
1 Billion
What industries are most successful on this social network?
Beauty, Fashion, Fitness, Food & Drink, Travel, eCommerce Stores
What makes it stand apart from the rest?
Primed purely for mobile. It's growing faster than any other social network. Instagram has given rise to influencer marketing and, allows brands to showcase themselves visually on an App designed to fill mobile screens.
What are the demographics of their core users?
Slightly more popular with females (but only slightly), their core users are aged between 18-34, although it is fast growing in popularity with the 13-17 age group (the future of social media users).
Since being acquired by Facebook, has gone from strength to strength, making it one of the world's biggest social networks.

Insta is one of the first social networks built for mobile. And although users can login via desktop, they can only view content and are unable to post anything. Their mobile targeting is one of the key reasons for their intense growth, with internet usage on mobile growing year-on-year.

Their platform features a newsfeed that runs on a similar algorithm to Facebook's, with posts that receive high engagement appearing higher on the newsfeed.

Insta posts are also discoverable by the 'Explore' page and by searching (and following) hashtags.

Brands and businesses that choose to focus on Instagram should set up an Instagram Business profile, to track the performance and analytics of their posts. Using this priceless information, they can optimise and prime their strategy for greater engagement (which means wider reach) and an increase in followers.

As Insta is owned by Facebook, their ads tend to perform very well (because of the detailed targeting options). If you are thinking about running ads on Insta, I recommend using Facebook's Business Manager platform and editing the placements to Instagram only. This will allow you to be much more specific with your audiences and targeting options.

Another great way to grow your Insta following is to use Instagram 'influencers'. These are profiles with large, engaged followings, who promote products via recommendations (to their followings), rather than pushing them with a traditional ad.

If your products have visual appeal, Instagram is probably the place for you!

Number of MAU's (monthly active users):
330 Million
What industries are most successful on this social network?
Tech, Content Creators (e.g. magazines, education), News/Media
What makes it stand apart from the rest?
Birthplace of the hashtag. Ruthlessly honest and direct culture amongst users. Always the first place to break news and make announcements go 'viral'. Incredibly loyal user base.
What are the demographics of their core users?
Popular with a broad age group, their core users stretch from as young as 18, up to 50. Tend to be mid or high earners and have predominantly been through higher-education (college and university).
I don't know about you, but it feels like has been around forever.

It might not be growing (as a network) like some of the other social media sites on this list, but it has solidly held its user size over the previous few years...

...this is because Twitter users tend to be fiercely loyal to the site.

What makes Twitter stand out from the other networks, is its reliance on real-time, immediate information. This has made it one of the best places (on the internet) to find and follow breaking news and events as they happen.

This reliance is reflected by their newsfeed algorithm, which shows posts almost exclusively by the time they have been posted. Although this can have advantages for brands, it also poses problems.

Posts (or Tweets) are often unseen by a large percentage of a user's following (if they aren't on the network at that time to see it). This has made it one of the hardest networks to gain engagement on.

The only way for brands to combat this problem is to post more. That means creating numerous (as many as 6 or 7) tweets a day. This equates to more work, but even so, Twitter can still be a highly rewarding place for the right businesses.

If you market a business that shares information regularly, breaks news or launches new products, Twitter might just be the network for you.

Number of MAU's (monthly active users):
330 Million
What industries are most successful on this social network?
Education, Tech, Art, Computer Games (and Apps), Politics
What makes it stand apart from the rest?
It's separated into different areas (subreddits) by category. Fiercely loyal and straight-talking community who hate promotional content. A great place to learn and discover new things.
What are the demographics of their core users?
Predominantly males, aged between 20-40.
Reddit calls itself 'the front page of the internet', and for more than 300 million people, that's certainly the case.

If you haven't used before, it's an interesting mix of news, links, social commentary and eye-opening images, set within a tight-knit community.

The community that hang out there are what make Reddit, Reddit. They hate promotional posts, self-serving links and people who don't do anything to entertain, inspire or educate the rest of the community. In other words, bad marketers.

However, the fact that they arrange pages by categories and topics (known as subreddits), makes it an interesting proposition for businesses online. If you are able to prove your worth to fellow 'Redditors', you'll build your Reddit 'Karma', which will increase your standing within the community and your 'subreddit' category.

Marketers and brands who get involved with the Reddit community can see huge rewards in terms of traffic, but this can take a lot of time and effort.

If you're thinking about getting involved with Reddit, prepare yourself to invest time, effort and a lot of valuable content before you see results. However, if your audience are predominantly men and (dare I say it) slightly geeky (Reddit is very popular among computer gamers), it could be well worth the investment.

Number of MAU's (monthly active users):
303 Million
What industries are most successful on this social network?
Anyone in B2B, e.g. IT, marketing, human resources, computing, recruitment, finance
What makes it stand apart from the rest?
The best place on the web for professional networking. Great for connecting with other businesses and sharing professional news and updates.
What are the demographics of their core users?
Primarily city and urban living users, higher educated and more popular with the 30+ age group. LinkedIn boasts the users with the highest average income.
What started as an online CV (resume) and job search website, has evolved into a fully-fledged social network with personal profiles, newsfeed, advertising and tons of valuable content.

It seems that every other time I visit they've added something new to their platform (they've just added the option to reply to posts with Celebrate, Love, Insightful or Curious, in addition to their usual 'Like' button).

Actions like this tell us the direction that LinkedIn would like to take their business...and they're certainly a welcome addition to the world's biggest social networks, especially for businesses in a B2B industry.

The platform allows businesses to network, connect with others and is a great place to share thought-leadership articles to establish expert positioning.

As well as this, LinkedIn also offer businesses the opportunity to advertise on their newsfeed, direct to users inbox or in the networks side columns. LinkedIn advertising is more expensive than the majority of the other networks, but the ROI on these ads can be sky-high, because LinkedIn users tend to be decision-makers and high earners.

If you're involved in a B2B industry or would like to target a market of professionals, LinkedIn is your ideal network (catch it now while it's still growing).

Number of MAU's (monthly active users):
287 Million
What industries are most successful on this social network?
Any business targeting a younger market due to the predominant age group of their users.
What makes it stand apart from the rest?
Posts disappear after they are viewed. Used by younger audiences to communicate with each other. Because of its in-the-moment updates (that disappear) it's the perfect network for behind the scenes storytelling posts.
What are the demographics of their core users?
The core of Snapchat's users are aged between 13-29. Giving it the youngest average usership age of any networks in our list. There are slightly more female users than male.
A few years ago, it seemed like was primed to explode, but after Instagram (and now Facebook) introduced their 'Story' feature, they haven't grown quite as expected.

However, that doesn't mean Snapchat isn't an awesome place for marketers.

This network is the place to be if your business sells products that target a young market (13-30) and because of the variety in this demographic (on Snapchat), it isn't restricted to certain industries.

Posts disappear as soon as they are viewed, making Snapchat an in-the-moment network that demands attention from an audience. This is great for brands who use a storytelling or behind-the-scenes posting strategy, e.g. a fashion brand could post the setting-up and planning elements of a fashion show over a series of posts.

Snapchat is also a great place for direct communications and is commonly used as a customer-service style platform between businesses and their customers (similar to Twitter). Connecting directly with customers in this way can make them feel closer to a brand, and is a great strategy if you're prepared to be responsive.

The network also offer advertising placements (between posts and stories) and is another great place to use Influencer marketing to grow your following (similar to Instagram).

If you've got visually appealing products, have a great story to tell and are aiming at millennials (or anybody under 30), Snapchat is a great option for you!

Number of MAU's (monthly active users):
250 Million
What industries are most successful on this social network?
Arts and Crafts, Food and Drink, Health, Fashion, Home
What makes it stand apart from the rest?
Pinterest uses a 'pin' system that inspires and influences buying decisions. It's a very visual platform, allowing businesses that rely on photos and images to thrive. Pinterest ads look like normal posts, making it a great place to advertise (if it fits your industry and target market).
What are the demographics of their core users?
The majority of Pinterest users are women, who have high incomes and spending power. Most of their users have been through some form of higher education.
is a social network where users go to find inspiration, search for the latest trends and are visually roused into action.

This network sets itself from the rest in terms of business and brand performance, because users actually go there to discover their content. This is in stark opposition to many of the other networks, where brands have to make an effort to disrupt users.

This is reflected by the fact that 78% of Pinterest users say that content created by brands is useful. This percentage is higher than any other network. Making Pinterest an interesting and potentially very profitable channel for marketers.

Despite having the smallest number of monthly active users (in our list) Pinterest-ers represent a very distinct demographic. They are predominantly women (almost 70%), are typically high earners with disposable cash and are typically well-educated.

This very distinct market of users are also known to make purchase decisions from Pinterest 'Pins'.

Pinterest also offer businesses the opportunity to advertise using 'Promoted Pins'. These 'promoted pins' sync seamlessly with other pins, hiding their status as an advertisement on a network that 1 in 2 users have used to make a purchase decision.

If you're targeting a market similar to Pinterest's very distinctive user base, this is an amazing network to drive high ROI and connect with your market.

In my experience as a digital marketer, these are the top social networks for businesses, brands and marketers, however...

...if there's a network that you think is worth analysing and adding to this list, let me know in the comments and I'll get to it! (Nobody's perfect after all).

Before you go, remember my opening advice: start out with Facebook and one other network and build out them there! When you've achieved your aim, move onto the next most suitable network, and so on...until you've achieved total social domination.

And if you'd like to get started with Facebook advertising (or up your game), head over to our Ultimate Guide to Facebook Ad Campaign Objectives 2019.

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The Ultimate Guide to Social Networks for Business: Which Networks Should You Focus On? - Einstein Marketer

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The number 1 mistake made by businesses, entrepreneurs and marketers on social media is... ...trying to manage too many different networks. Before I dive into the reasons behind this, ask yourself: Is it better for your business to reach 100% of its marketing potential on 1 (or 2) marketing channels, or 15% on many?

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Optimizing WordPress for Search engines is not rocket science and very beginner friendly. In this beginners guide, I will be giving you an overview on what you should do to improve your on-page SEO and get your content noticed by search engines!

Setting up your WordPress Site

Should I use an SSL certificate or is it enough to continue without it?

The short answer is, yes you should adopt SSL on your website. Since 2014 Google has steadily increased the importance it gives to HTTPS websites. Not only does it make your website more secure for your visitors, but it also improves speed (taking advantage of modern web technologies) and several studies by the folks of MOZ, SEM Rush and Ahrefs have found a direct correlation between HTTPS and higher search rankings.

Should I use www or non-www?

Choose the one you prefer, there is no SEO advantage of one over the other. Once you have chosen your preferred version, stick to it! WordPress will automatically redirect your visitors to the version you have set under "Settings - General".

But what if you already have an existing website and suddenly change from one version to the other? In this case, please make sure that you 301 redirect the old URLs to the new ones. This will let search engines know which version you prefer. A great plugin that will help you with all your redirection needs is "Redirection".

Permalink structure - Keep your URLs readable and short!

After creating a new WordPress site, the first thing to check are your permalinks, which are the URLs for your pages and posts. Go to "Settings - Permalinks" and make sure that the "Post name" is selected.

By structuring your URLs this way, visitors can look at your URL and know immediately what your post or page is about and secondly Google tends to prefer short URLs over longer ones. According to former Google's head of webspam team Matt Cutts, after 5 words in your URL: "[Google] algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit."

If you already have a WordPress site and want to change your permalink structure, remember to also redirect the old URLs to the new ones.

Preparing your content

A catchy Title and stay away from clickbait

The title should always tell your visitor what your blog post or page is about and also include your target keyword. Currently, I'm writing a guide about WordPress SEO techniques, my title is "WordPress SEO in 2019 - A Beginners Guide", with " WordPress SEO" as my primary keyword. Also, think about the value proposition, what is it that my readers will get out of this blog post and if I were a reader, why would I click on the title? Writing good and catchy titles can be a bit of a pain, I recommend reading this excellent article from CoSchedule about this topic!

Revisting the Permalink

By default, WordPress includes the whole post/page title into its permalink URL. Remember, we want to keep our URLs short. If possible, remove stopwords such as "a, the, and" and shorten the URL, it should still reflect what your article is about and include your primary keyword.

Optimize your Images

When preparing images for your blog post, always make sure that they are optimized for the web and have a small file size. Page speed plays a vital role in SEO. WordPress, offers a broad range of plugins to optimize your images, here is a list of our three favorite image optimization plugins! Alt tags should also always be included with your image, making it more accessible for screen readers and boosting its visibility on Google images.

Content Hierarchy

It is very important that we have our content well formatted. Use the h1 to h4 tag for headlines, ul, ol elements for unordered and ordered lists, blockquote for quotes and so on. Since h1 is already used automatically for your site title, use h2 for subtitles and h3 for list titles. This will not only improve the user experience, but also make it easier for web crawlers to index your content! Personally, I tend to avoid Sidebars on Blog posts, since widgets commonly use the h3 as a widget title and sidebar links that are used across the whole site, hardly have something to do with the specific content of my blog post.

Working with Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is the WordPress standard plugin for search engine optimization. Before you start to publish your own content you should install and activate the plugin.

After activation, at the bottom of each page/post we can edit the site title as well as add a meta description. Regarding the site title, we will do the same thing we already did to our URL. We will edit the title in a way that it still conveys our message, but keep it short for search engines. The meta description is a great way to describe what our post is about and can further encourage a user to click on our link!

Conclusion

That concludes our guide for SEO WordPress for beginners. We have covered the very basic steps from setting up a WordPress site to structuring your content. In my next post, we will get into more advanced techniques for WordPress SEO, such as XML Sitemaps, duplicate content, caching and speeding up your website!

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WordPress SEO in 2019 - A Beginners Guide - ShapingRain.com

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Optimizing WordPress for Search engines is not rocket science and very beginner friendly. In this beginners guide, I will be giving you an overview on what you should do to improve your on-page SEO and get your content noticed by search engines! The short answer is, yes you should adopt SSL on your website.

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If you've ever gotten stuck in a blog rut-you're not alone.

Coming up with weekly blog post ideas starts to get hard, especially if you have a small team. We've all hit that content brick wall and thought to ourselves-"there's just nothing left to post about."

At DigitalMarketer, we face the same struggle. Publishing content is our thing, but that doesn't mean every now and then we don't sit down and think, now what?

So to make sure this happens as infrequently as possible, we've created the The Ultimate List of Blog Post Ideas. You can check out the infographic linked below, or read on to get more explanation and curated examples of many of these post ideas.

We've grouped the ideas based on 8 goals for a blog post. This way you are writing posts that best fit your needs, rather than just churning out posts.

1. Useful Posts

2. Generous Posts

3. Entertaining Posts

4. Timely Posts

5. Human Posts

6. Promotional Posts

7. Controversial Posts

8. Engaging Posts

Here is the ultimate list of blog post ideas so you never face blog writers block again.

Download the full infographic HERE!

Useful Posts
List Post
List posts are everywhere, and for good reason... they flat out work. Create a list of books, tools, resources, or any other thing that your market will find useful.

The DigitalMarketer blog gets a ton of traffic when we post list style articles about book recommendations. So, guess what we keep posting?

You guessed it. Here's one of our book recommendation articles.
How-To Post
The How-To Post is another staple blog post idea. This post describes how to execute a process and uses images, video, or audio to enrich the post and make it as easy as possible for your visitor to take action.

An example of a How-To Post is our blog post, "How to Design Facebook Ad Images Like a Pro (...When You're Really an Amateur)."
Case Study Post
Using "case study" in your headline makes your article sound like it has more value than a regular blog post. Case studies carry weight; you know you'll learn something from a case study post because they always open the hood on something we're curious to know more about. The firsthand experience makes these posts extra juicy.

Case study posts outline and unpack the details of a project, event, or process and show you how it turned out.

Molly Pittman wrote a case study post on the dog walking app Wag for the DigitalMarketer blog:
Problem/Solution Post
This type of post has an easy format:

1. Define a problem

2. Present the solution

This post can cross over into the territory of other blog post types such as the FAQ Post, How-To Post, or Checklist Post.

You'll start to notice that a lot of the DigitalMarketer blogs are problem/solution posts because that's our thing. Our goal is to help marketers solve their problems, so naturally we write a lot of solution-based posts.

If you attended the 2019 Traffic & Conversion Summit, you'll know that one of the biggest problems our attendees have when they leave is that their heads are full of TOO much information. To help combat this symptom of T&C, we wrote a blog post that showed attendees what to do to organize themselves and start executing on all of the hot tips they got at the summit.
FAQ Post
If you get repeat questions from customers or prospects, there is a good chance they are typing these same questions into Google and other search engines. You can also use online tools to figure out what questions your customers have.

For example, we're big fans of using Quora to figure out what content to create. On Quora, people ask questions and anybody can answer them. You can search for "digital marketing" (or any relevant keyword for your business) and see what the most commonly asked questions are around it. Then you just create content around these topics.

One question we get day after day is how do I write good headlines for my blog posts? We answered that question in this blog post.
Research Post
Conducting your own primary research around a topic in your niche is one of the best ways to build blog content that gets attention.

Not only will this frame you as the authority, but this post can also serve as a valuable resource and be linked to by other blogs referencing your research. And we all know what happens when another website backlinks yours-your SEO ranking goes up.
Checklist Post
If the content you are delivering can be broken into a "checklist" it will often perform better. People like the checklist format because it's easy to digest and act on when the content is itemized in this way.

For example, we wrote this blog post, "[Checklist] 5 Copywriting Elements to Test on Your Landing Page."
The Ultimate Guide Post
The ultimate guide post is just what it sounds like-a detailed, comprehensive post on a topic in your niche. The most important part of this post is that you're staying true to your word. If you promise the ultimate guide, you better deliver.

For example, our blog post, "The Ultimate Guide to Ecommerce Email Marketing (Online Retailers, this One's for You...)" is 16,000 words long and uses over 70 pictures to make the content as clear as possible.
Definition Post
In niches where there might be complicated ideas or confusing terms, the definition post is an absolute must. Consider creating a series of posts that define aspects of your niche. The DigitalMarketer blog is full of these types of posts, even including one titled "What Is Digital Marketing?" Don't forget-just because you know a lot about your industry doesn't mean your customer does.

What basic knowledge does your customer need to know that you're overlooking?

For example, we published the post, "What is Email Marketing? A Quick Guide to Getting it Right."
Series Post
Look for opportunities to break a topic into a series that can be released each day over the course of a week or month. Link these articles together as you publish them.

For example, our "What Is Digital Marketing" blog post is the first in a series of definition posts, the second being our "What is Email Marketing?" post, and so on.
Stats Post
This post (like the Research Post) works best when you can use statistics that you have produced. That said, consider curating and pulling together stats from multiple locations to create a good statistics post. These posts are also great reference points for other blogs to use and can help your SEO.

( NOTE: Need a helping hand with your digital marketing efforts? Or maybe you just want proven, actionable marketing tools, tactics, and templates to implement in your business? Check out the latest deal from DigitalMarketer, and you will be on your way to helping your business grow.)
Pillar Post
A Pillar Post uses evergreen content that is core to your company to create a content pillar that you can link back to often. This helps create a consistent source of traffic for you and your business.

This can be a really helpful if you are just starting out with your blog and need a foundation of good content. And remember, you can always have more than 1 pillar post.

Learn more about creating a Pillar Post here! This post-yes, about pillar posts-serves as a great pillar post for DM.
Video Review Post
With a Video Review Post, just review a video that's related to your audience. This can be done as either a review of the whole video, or you can take screenshots, add explanations, and embed the video into your post.
Tips Post
Here is a super easy way to create a blog post. Just compile a list of tips for your audience. These can be tips on how to do something better, tips for getting a good deal on something, or any other relevant subject for your audience.

We created a post for tips on how to make PowerPoint less boring, that way our audience could create better presentations.
SAQ Post
The Should Ask Question Post is a variation of the FAQ post. This is a question that customers or prospects don't ask-but they should.

What are your customers always overlooking that you can shine a light on?

For example, marketers overlooking retargeting campaigns are missing out on a huge conversion opportunity. We shined the light on retargeting and gave 3 easy steps to set up a retargeting campaign.
Tools Post
Like the Tips Post, this is an easy way to stay useful with your audience. Just post a list of tools that you think your audience will find helpful. You can rate them, review them, or just make it a simple list.

For example, we created a list of our favorite keyword research tools.

Human Posts
Inspirational Post
Some of the most effective content on the web is neither informational or entertaining-it simply inspires. This kind of post can work well as a Story Post, Profile Post, or Quote Post among others.

At the 2019 Traffic & Conversion Summit, Ryan Deiss dropped major knowledge on the crowd during his Opening Keynote Speech. He talked about the current state of marketing and how everything is poop. Seriously, that is exactly what he said (there were also many poop emojis involved).

In true Ryan Deiss fashion, he made us cry and then he made us laugh. By the end of his speech, everyone at T&C was hungry to be one of the marketers who makes it through the next disruption in the industry.
Here's the blog article we wrote off of his keynote. Holiday Post
Some blogs go dormant on popular holidays while others use the opportunity to deliver well-wishes to their audience and display their humanity. For example, you can write articles about holidays and how they affect your industry.
Guard-Down Post
When a content creator lets their guard down by delivering a deeply personal experience that the audience to relate to, the audience is going to feel way more connected to you and your company. So go ahead and get vulnerable.
Behind the Scenes Post
If you have a loyal following, they will want to see what goes on behind the scenes of the content that you can create. Transparency creates a stronger connection between you and your customer.

If you've noticed, DigitalMarketer is really transparent. We'll talk about our views, our numbers, and our strategy. During one of Roland Frasier's presentations at T&C, he explained exactly how we make money off of our events and how we're going to keep making more money despite having sold T&C this year.

Behind the scenes post connect us to you. It shows you guys that we're not bigger or better, we're playing the same game and we want to be your teammate, not your competitor.
Off-Topic Post
This can be risky, but if you have a loyal following that has become accustomed to you covering a specific set of topics-this kind of post can shock them and receive a great response.
Rant Post
The rant post shows your human side by revealing your passion and anger about a topic that is relevant to your audience. This type of post is for a specific brand whose customers aren't going to be appalled by their anger. We don't have any DigitalMarketer examples to show you for this type of post because that's not our brand.

For some brands, this type of post is going to go viral in your community.
Home Runs Post
It's human to celebrate the wins (and it's also one of our core values!) and talk about when things go right. Share your company's home runs in a blog post so that your audience can see what you are doing that is working (and hopefully use that knowledge themselves).

This post works as well as a yearly reflection, or as an event wrap-up. We at DM do a yearly home run post that includes home runs from our partners as well as our internal employees.
Bloopers/Mess-Ups Post
Just like it's human to celebrate the wins, it is human to mess up and learn from it. Showing your customers that you mess up will help them see you as human, and they will feel more connected to you.

This can be a reflection post about the mistakes your company has made, or it can be a video blooper reel, like our yearly blooper reel on the DM blog.

Generous Posts
Profile Post
The Profile Posts profiles an influential person in your niche. The most important part of this post is not to publish it and forget it. Don't expect the person to telepathically know that you just wrote a killer blog post highlighting them.

Tweet them, tag them on your Instagram story promoting the article, tag them on Facebook, email them, and if you can, call them. What you're aiming for is that they see your profile and share it with their audience (so you both get more traffic).
Crowdsourced Post
Crowdsourcing is a great way to get as many experts and influencers as possible in one place at a time. Have each influencer talk about a single topic and then put it together in a blog post.

For example, we had 14 digital marketing experts tell us about their best campaigns and marketing strategies in 2018 (this is also an example of a Home Run Post). Then, we threw it in a blog post and published it so everyone could get the scoop.
Interview Post
It's surprising how willing even the most influential people are to give you an interview-even if you have a small audience on your blog. Remember that an easy way for an influencer to give you an interview is through audio-all they have to do is call you and start talking.

For even more content, you can record this interview through video and post it to YouTube and Facebook, and then transcribe it into a blog post. If you're feeling really spicy, you can splice up some key talking points (30-60 second videos) and share them on your socials to promote the blog post/full video.

We did this for an interview with Dennis Yu, to great success.
Link Roundup Post
This type of post can work well as a series that publishes once a month or once a week. Curate, link to and provide a description of multiple pieces of content that your audience will find valuable.

Find content that is relevant to your customer and put it in one place for them. You don't have to necessarily provide the content, you just need to create the place where it's all conveniently organized.
Quote Post
People love quotes from influential people. They. Love. Them.

Pull together quotes from multiple influencers across a specific topic to create a Quote Post.

Again, if applicable-be sure to notify the people that you've quoted to see if you can get a retweet mention, or share.
Best of the Web Post
The Best of the Web Post often includes content, tools, and other resources that you have curated, linked to, and described. For example, you could have a Friday blog post that rounds up the 5 best most important things that happened in your niche that week.
Pick of the Week Post
This is a popular type of series post and is usually a relatively short blog post that describes a single piece of content, tool, or other resource that you have curated, linked to and described.
People to Follow Post
Curate a list of influential people, describe them, and provide links for your audience to connect with them through their website, social media channels, events, books, etc.

DigitalMarketer, for example, wrote a blog post on, "7 Women in Marketing to Watch Out For."

We highlighted what their specialty is, where to find them, the things they've achieved that make us say, "woaaaahhhh" and what they're focusing on right now.
Content Aggregator
This is a hybrid form of the list post that uses other people's content. Find the most socially viral content on a given topic and aggregate it into one post.

DigitalMarketer does this often when we publish posts like the one below. We'll pull different Instagram video ads from other companies to show you what they're doing right and in some cases, what they're doing wrong.

Promotional Posts
Comparison Post
Create a post that compares the features and benefits of your product to competitive solutions. This is the perfect opportunity to:

1. Highlight what your product does really well

2. Highlight what your product does poorly

If you feel hesitant to talk about what your product doesn't do-it's normal. But, this transparency builds trust. If you're honest about what you can and can't give your customers, you'll find the right customers who only need what you can provide and will become raving fans of your product.

( NOTE: Need a helping hand with your digital marketing efforts? Or maybe you just want proven, actionable marketing tools, tactics, and templates to implement in your business? Check out the latest deal from DigitalMarketer, and you will be on your way to helping your business grow.)
Project Showcase Post
Use your blog to outline a specific project you or your organization is working on currently or has completed and show the process. Even better-share the results if possible. This post is similar to a case study.

For example, DigitalMarketer posted "BIG MONEY from Small Marketing Events: How I made $500k+ in New Revenue from Running Live Events on a Shoestring Budget."
Income Report Post
Open the books and show your audience a breakdown of the money you and your organization are making. People love to see the backend of your business and again-we know we're a broken record-transparency is a big part of the customer-company relationship. If you're showing your customers the books, they're going to trust you.
Company Update Post
Use your blog to let your customers and prospects know of new employee hires, acquisitions, or major contracts. This is a good time to update them to what's happening and has a similar format to the behind the scenes blog posts.

For example, DigitalMarketer made a major company update when we announced that we had sold the Traffic & Conversion Summit. We wrote a blog post to help T&C attendees understand why and to make sure they knew that it was only going to make the summit bigger and better next year.
Presentation Post
Publishing presentations given by employees is a great way to create more content without doing a lot of extra work. Presentations can easily be turned into blog posts and you didn't have to do much extra work.

We took a stellar agency training from Brad Martineau and wrote the article, "Re-align Your Business Purpose with 4 Takeaways from Brad Martineau's Agency Training."
Best-of Post
Create a blog post that pulls together the most popular blog posts you have published over a period of time. This is a great opportunity to drive more traffic to your highest performing blog posts. When something works, keep pushing it-that's what this strategy is all about.

We found the blog articles we published in 2018 that accumulated the most views and put them in one place in our post, "DigitalMarketer's 21 Best Articles for Organic Traffic in 2018."
Year-in-Review Post
You can showcase all the things your company has done or made during the year in this reflection post. It not only serves to show your current customers what you have done, but it can also give prospects a snapshot of who you are. And the more your audience knows you, but more they will trust you.

For example, we post the DigitalMarketer Year in Review every year to show all of our blog readers what's going on behind the scenes at DM.
Product Update Post
If you have rabid fans of your products and services, you might be surprised at how well a post on new product/new feature announcements will do on your blog. For example, you could announce your new dark mode feature and how your customers can access it.
Product Tips Post
This post type is both promotional and useful and is very powerful for the right blog and audience. Create content that helps your customers be more successful with your product or services.

We create several pieces of content that promote T&C. This year, we created an entire podcast episode on it and published this article to help T&C attendees prepare for the summit.

Controversial Posts
What If Posts
This type of blog post speculates on "What would happen if...."

The success of this type of post rests on your ability to choose a "what if" that is interesting and debatable. Use these questions to get the gears moving:

What big changes are happening in my industry that I can speculate on?

What big change could happen in my industry that would make a massive disruption?

What would happen if my entire industry vanished overnight?

Debate Post
Use your blog to present one side of the debatable argument or find someone that disagrees with you and present both sides in the same post.
Attack Post
Disclaimer: Be very careful with this one

Now that we've taken all responsibility off of ourselves, here's what you need to know about attack posts. Picking a fight with the right person/organization/event, etc., will force your audience to choose sides and draw lots of attention.

This type of post, when done right, will create enemies of some and die-hard fans of others.
Prediction Post
If you take a debatable and speculative approach, a prediction post can get a great response.

For example, we published, "How Digital Marketing Will Change: 17 Predictions for 2019."
Reaction Post
Use your blog to react to content created by someone else. For example, the content might be a blog post, book, presentation, interview, or podcast episode.
Embed Reactor
Find an embeddable video (think Youtube), Slideshare presentation, or infographic that is going viral in your niche right now. Then, embed it in your blog post and post your reaction under it. It can help to use a title that is a variation of the resource you are embedding.

Entertaining Posts
Story Post
Create content that tells a story that would be entertaining to your market. Some blogs only produce this type of content and others create a series around it.
Satire Post
Be humorous through the use of irony or extreme exaggeration-this kind of post works well where there are timely issues such as politics or sports.
Cartoon Post
This type of post works well as a series. Create weekly or monthly cartoon posts that make your audience laugh and think about issues and events in your niche.
Meme Post
Memes are humorous pieces of content that spread virally across the web. You can create your own memes or find relevant memes on the web through a Google search.
Parody Post
Create a post that imitates a well-known person or media property in your niche-be sure to exaggerate their strengths and shortcomings in your content.

Timely Posts
Review Post
Review a product, event, or anything else you have access to. The key to a review post is that it has to be published while the product, event, etc., is trending. For example, reviewing a Snuggie in 2019 isn't going to be a viral sensation.

For best results, be as honest as possible in your review rather than painting everything you review in a positive light.

( NOTE: Need a helping hand with your digital marketing efforts? Or maybe you just want proven, actionable marketing tools, tactics, and templates to implement in your business? Check out the latest deal from DigitalMarketer, and you will be on your way to helping your business grow.)
Survey Post
Choose a newsworthy/trending topic and survey your audience about it using email, social media, or in-person events. Then, pull the results together into a blog post. You can title it, "We Surveyed 100 People: Here's What They Think About the Impossible Burger."
News Post
Create content on your blog about events as they are happening. You don't need to "break" the story but you want to offer your own insights around the trending topic.
Trend Post
Some content creators are able to predict trends as they are happening. If you're a trendsetter, create content on your blog that rides that trend as it becomes popular.

If you're in an industry where there are always new features or changes happening, use this post style to create pillar content around the topic.

For example, DigitalMarketer published, "Facebook's Comment-to-Messenger Feature: Everything You Need to Know" when the feature first went live.
Issue Post
Choose issues that affect your audience and create content around it while it's relevant to them. This doesn't necessarily have to always be a new topic, but it has to be new information.

For example, social media marketing is always evolving. We can keep writing posts like this one.

Because our customers always need to know how to get more followers depending on how the algorithm has changed this quarter. The topic stays the same, but the information changes.
Takeaways Post
For the Takeaways Post, you will want to react to an event, presentation, or experience, and then list out your top takeaways from it. This should be done pretty soon after the event, since you want to remain timely and capitalize on that event's popularity.

We posted a takeaways pos t right after the end of Traffic and Conversion Summit 2019.

Engaging Posts
Question Post
Question posts are created from an interaction with your audience. Ask them on social media or forums to ask questions that will be answered in a blog post. You can also have them comment on another blog post to submit their questions.
Answer Post
The Answer Post is the sister of the Question Post. In this post type, you will simply ask a question and allow your audience to answer it in your comments section. This type of post is generally very short, allowing your audience to create the bulk of the content.
Challenge Post
Use a blog post to pose a challenge to your audience. This post can work well as a series with updates being made that feature audience members who are participating in a challenge.
Customer Showcase Post
This blog post type is partly promotional but also builds engagement. Use your blog to feature a customer or a project you have worked on with the customer. You can use a similar strategy to a case study to showcase the benefits of your product or service.
Freebie Post
Use a blog post to allow your audience to get access to a relevant giveaway.

DigitalMarketer gave away free T&C tickets to anyone who subscribed to the DigitalMarketer podcast, left a rating and review on iTunes and shared the podcast on Facebook or Twitter.

We wrote this blog post to promote the giveaway.
Contest Post
Announce a contest on your blog. This post can work well as a series or with updates being made featuring contest results.

This is your ultimate guide to writing blog posts, so you never have to hit the content brick wall of writers block again. Steal our ideas and use them to make your own content go viral.

( NOTE: Need a helping hand with your digital marketing efforts? Or maybe you just want proven, actionable marketing tools, tactics, and templates to implement in your business? Check out the latest deal from DigitalMarketer, and you will be on your way to helping your business grow.)

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The Ultimate List of Blog Post Ideas | DigitalMarketer

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If you've ever gotten stuck in a blog rut-you're not alone. Coming up with weekly blog post ideas starts to get hard, especially if you have a small team. We've all hit that content brick wall and thought to ourselves-"there's just nothing left to post about." At DigitalMarketer, we face the same struggle.

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10 Basic SEO Tips to Index + Rank New Content Faster - Whiteboard Friday

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10 Basic SEO Tips to Index + Rank New Content Faster - Whiteboard Friday

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In SEO, speed is a competitive advantage.

When you publish new content, you want users to find it ranking in search results as fast as possible. Fortunately, there are a number of tips and tricks in the SEO toolbox to help you accomplish this goal. Sit back, turn up your volume, and let Cyrus Shepard show you exactly how in this week's Whiteboard Friday.

[Note: #3 isn't covered in the video, but we've included in the post below. Enjoy!]

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cyrus Shepard, back in front of the whiteboard. So excited to be here today. We're talking about ten tips to index and rank new content faster.

You publish some new content on your blog, on your website, and you sit around and you wait. You wait for it to be in Google's index. You wait for it to rank. It's a frustrating process that can take weeks or months to see those rankings increase. There are a few simple things we can do to help nudge Google along, to help them index it and rank it faster. Some very basic things and some more advanced things too. We're going to dive right in.

Indexing

1. URL Inspection / Fetch & Render

So basically, indexing content is not that hard in Google. Google provides us with a number of tools. The simplest and fastest is probably the URL Inspection tool. It's in the new Search Console, previously Fetch and Render. As of this filming, both tools still exist. They are depreciating Fetch and Render. The new URL Inspection tool allows you to submit a URL and tell Google to crawl it. When you do that, they put it in their priority crawl queue. That just simply means Google has a list of URLs to crawl. It goes into the priority, and it's going to get crawled faster and indexed faster.

2. Sitemaps!

Another common technique is simply using sitemaps. If you're not using sitemaps, it's one of the easiest, quickest ways to get your URLs indexed. When you have them in your sitemap, you want to let Google know that they're actually there. There's a number of different techniques that can actually optimize this process a little bit more.

The first and the most basic one that everybody talks about is simply putting it in your robots.txt file. In your robots.txt, you have a list of directives, and at the end of your robots.txt, you simply say sitemap and you tell Google where your sitemaps are. You can do that for sitemap index files. You can list multiple sitemaps. It's really easy.

You can also do it using the Search Console Sitemap Report, another report in the new Search Console. You can go in there and you can submit sitemaps. You can remove sitemaps, validate. You can also do this via the Search Console API.

But a really cool way of informing Google of your sitemaps, that a lot of people don't use, is simply pinging Google. You can do this in your browser URL. You simply type in google.com/ping, and you put in the sitemap with the URL. You can try this out right now with your current sitemaps. Type it into the browser bar and Google will instantly queue that sitemap for crawling, and all the URLs in there should get indexed quickly if they meet Google's quality standard.

Example: https://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=https://example.com/sitemap.xml

3. Google Indexing API

(BONUS: This wasn't in the video, but we wanted to include it because it's pretty awesome)

Within the past few months, both Google and Bing have introduced new APIs to help speed up and automate the crawling and indexing of URLs.

Both of these solutions allow for the potential of massively speeding up indexing by submitting 100s or 1000s of URLs via an API.

While the Bing API is intended for any new/updated URL, Google states that their API is specifically for "either job posting or livestream structured data." That said, many SEOs like David Sottimano have experimented with Google APIs and found it to work with a variety of content types.

If you want to use these indexing APIs yourself, you have a number of potential options:

Yoast announced they will soon support live indexing across both Google and Bing within their SEO Wordpress plugin.

Indexing & ranking

That's talking about indexing. Now there are some other ways that you can get your content indexed faster and help it to rank a little higher at the same time.

4. Links from important pages

When you publish new content, the basic, if you do nothing else, you want to make sure that you are linking from important pages. Important pages may be your homepage, adding links to the new content, your blog, your resources page. This is a basic step that you want to do. You don't want to orphan those pages on your site with no incoming links.

Adding the links tells Google two things. It says we need to crawl this link sometime in the future, and it gets put in the regular crawling queue. But it also makes the link more important. Google can say, "Well, we have important pages linking to this. We have some quality signals to help us determine how to rank it." So linking from important pages.

5. Update old content

But a step that people oftentimes forget is not only link from your important pages, but you want to go back to your older content and find relevant places to put those links. A lot of people use a link on their homepage or link to older articles, but they forget that step of going back to the older articles on your site and adding links to the new content.

Now what pages should you add from? One of my favorite techniques is to use this search operator here, where you type in the keywords that your content is about and then you do a site:example.com. This allows you to find relevant pages on your site that are about your target keywords, and those make really good targets to add those links to from your older content.

6. Share socially

Really obvious step, sharing socially. When you have new content, sharing socially, there's a high correlation between social shares and content ranking. But especially when you share on content aggregators, like Reddit, those create actual links for Google to crawl. Google can see those signals, see that social activity, sites like Reddit and Hacker News where they add actual links, and that does the same thing as adding links from your own content, except it's even a little better because it's external links. It's external signals.

7. Generate traffic to the URL

This is kind of an advanced technique, which is a little controversial in terms of its effectiveness, but we see it anecdotally working time and time again. That's simply generating traffic to the new content.

Now there is some debate whether traffic is a ranking signal. There are some old Google patents that talk about measuring traffic, and Google can certainly measure traffic using Chrome. They can see where those sites are coming from. But as an example, Facebook ads, you launch some new content and you drive a massive amount of traffic to it via Facebook ads. You're paying for that traffic, but in theory Google can see that traffic because they're measuring things using the Chrome browser.

When they see all that traffic going to a page, they can say, "Hey, maybe this is a page that we need to have in our index and maybe we need to rank it appropriately."

Ranking

Once we get our content indexed, talk about a few ideas for maybe ranking your content faster.

8. Generate search clicks

Along with generating traffic to the URL, you can actually generate search clicks.

Now what do I mean by that? So imagine you share a URL on Twitter. Instead of sharing directly to the URL, you share to a Google search result. People click the link, and you take them to a Google search result that has the keywords you're trying to rank for, and people will search and they click on your result.

You see television commercials do this, like in a Super Bowl commercial they'll say, "Go to Google and search for Toyota cars 2019." What this does is Google can see that searcher behavior. Instead of going directly to the page, they're seeing people click on Google and choosing your result.

1. Instead of this: https://moz.com/link-explorer

2. Share this: https://www.google.com/search?q=link+tool+moz

This does a couple of things. It helps increase your click-through rate, which may or may not be a ranking signal. But it also helps you rank for auto-suggest queries. So when Google sees people search for "best cars 2019 Toyota," that might appear in the suggest bar, which also helps you to rank if you're ranking for those terms. So generating search clicks instead of linking directly to your URL is one of those advanced techniques that some SEOs use.

9. Target query deserves freshness

When you're creating the new content, you can help it to rank sooner if you pick terms that Google thinks deserve freshness. It's best maybe if I just use a couple of examples here.

Consider a user searching for the term "cafes open Christmas 2019." That's a result that Google wants to deliver a very fresh result for. You want the freshest news about cafes and restaurants that are going to be open Christmas 2019. Google is going to preference pages that are created more recently. So when you target those queries, you can maybe rank a little faster.

Compare that to a query like "history of the Bible." If you Google that right now, you'll probably find a lot of very old pages, Wikipedia pages. Those results don't update much, and that's going to be harder for you to crack into those SERPs with newer content.

The way to tell this is simply type in the queries that you're trying to rank for and see how old the most recent results are. That will give you an indication of what Google thinks how much freshness this query deserves. Choose queries that deserve a little more freshness and you might be able to get in a little sooner.

10. Leverage URL structure

Finally, last tip, this is something a lot of sites do and a lot of sites don't do because they're simply not aware of it. Leverage URL structure. When Google sees a new URL, a new page to index, they don't have all the signals yet to rank it. They have a lot of algorithms that try to guess where they should rank it. They've indicated in the past that they leverage the URL structure to determine some of that.

Consider The New York Times puts all its book reviews under the same URL, newyorktimes.com/book-reviews. They have a lot of established ranking signals for all of these URLs. When a new URL is published using the same structure, they can assign it some temporary signals to rank it appropriately.

If you have URLs that are high authority, maybe it's your blog, maybe it's your resources on your site, and you're leveraging an existing URL structure, new content published using the same structure might have a little bit of a ranking advantage, at least in the short run, until Google can figure these things out.

These are only a few of the ways to get your content indexed and ranking quicker. It is by no means a comprehensive list. There are a lot of other ways. We'd love to hear some of your ideas and tips. Please let us know in the comments below. If you like this video, please share it for me. Thanks, everybody.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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10 Basic SEO Tips to Index + Rank New Content Faster - Whiteboard Friday

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When you publish new content, you want users to find it ranking in search results as fast as possible. Fortunately, there are a number of tips and tricks in the SEO toolbox to help you accomplish this goal. Sit back, turn up your volume, and let the Cyrus Shepard show you exactly how in this week's Whiteboard Friday.

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Useful is better than delightful.
If you've read my Before I start, a little bit of context. In the beginning of 2015 I gave a presentation where I framed animation as an essential discipline to design a good user experience, I talked about the 12 basic principles of animation, underlining which ones make sense in UI animations and all that shebang. More than two years later I'm more than aware that this is not exactly breaking news or is it going to shatter any ceilings. Companies like Apple & Google really made the effort to integrate animation in their products and by consequence facilitating and encouraging Developers & Designers across the world to do the same, and so they did. This was definitely a step in the right direction but along the way I think we've accidentally stepped on something brown, and it stinks a little.
WAIT! Don't pull out your pitchforks and torches just yet, let me first explain what I mean with a personal story. Let's go back in time to 2003. I was just getting started in graphic design and had little to no knowledge about it. I remember the first tool I learned how to use was Macromedia Freehand, and it was mind blowing. The possibilities were endless. Gradients, drop shadows, comic sans, you name it and I was using it all together. The result? Well, as you probably can imagine it looked like a mess. But don't give the young me a hard time, I was an unsupervised kid in a candy store, so I ate all the candy that I wanted and ended up with a belly ache. Just like John Snow, I knew nothing. Back to the present. You're probably asking: What does this have to do with animation? I think, EVERYTHING. Developers and Designers are the young me in this story, and in many apps and websites they're using animation recklessly, defeating the whole point of improving the user experience with animation. Now, I could go through a series of examples and point out what they're doing wrong but, honestly, that sounds kind of lazy. Instead I thought it could be more useful for you, reading this article, if I point out how (in my humble opinion, of course) animation can be integrated in a way that is not superfluous but rather an essential piece of a good user experience. So, after some time thinking and researching I came up with a list of 6 guidelines that I hope can be helpful for your animation endeavours. previous article you've probably already figured out that I'm quite fond of animation (aka motion design). Besides giving life to a static image, animation can help you tell a story much more effectively. Just look at the millions of people glued to their screens watching animated series (myself included...wubba lubba dub dub!). However, that's not all animation can do, that's precisely why I decided to write this article.
Let's start with the obvious one.

1. Animation shouldn't be an afterthought

You have all your interactions defined and visual design locked down to the pixel but you feel like something is missing. Then you might think "time to flair it up with some animation". Big mistake and one of the reasons why animation is being so misused. It's been considered at the end of the design process with the same consideration you would put into a transition effect in PowerPoint, and that's just wrong.

Think of the user experience as a cake. In most cases animation is being thought as the cherry on top of the cake but I completely disagree with that approach. I think animation should be just another ingredient that you need to mix into the cake batter.

This to say that animation should already be in your head when you are sketching your wireframes. It can be as simple as an arrow indicating where a certain object is going to go after a button is pressed or a simple note. Keep it simple, this will help you find a purpose for the motion (or a motion for a certain purpose) without focusing too much how it looks. This also helps you not to become too attached, because animation won't always be the solution to your problem. Just discard it if it's not helping you accomplish something, unnecessary animation will just be an obstacle for the end user.

This takes us straight to the next guideline.

2. Animation must serve a purpose

Gratuitous animation will just take your user's precious time and after the first initial delight the user will get tired of it, that's why animation needs to be functional. If you're wondering what animation can help you with, here are some examples.

Soften harsh cuts

Designer or not, we're all familiar with this. You are in screen A, you press a button and BAM! A completely different screen (B) suddenly appears. Then you're left wondering, where did you come from? Did I press the right button? What now? What if "B" is visually similar to A? The user might even think that nothing happened. This shows one of the most suitable candidates for animation, moments of change. Consider the time that takes to make the "journey" from screen A to B, what objects are kept in the screen and show your users how they got there. Don't overdo it though, as you'll discover further down, animation is better served "invisible".

Provide context

Sometimes you land on a screen and you're not quite sure how to interact with it straight away. A good way to help the user is to provide a clue of the proprieties of a certain object when it is introduced. If you have a list of posts, for instance, sliding them could help the user understand that he can keep swiping to see more. You can even add another layer to this by timing their appearance in a way they slide one after the other, this will reinforce that these items are separate and you can interact with each one individually.

Let's say that you decide to tap one of them and it opens to display the entire content for a specific post. Now the information that was previously at the same level of others is now the principal. To animate this transition is a good way to reinforce the user's selection and also to show that you're still interacting with the same object but in a focused state, which also gives you more screen real-estate.

Provide Orientation

When all the obstacles between the UI and the user are removed from the equation the UI becomes more physical, therefore it's important to give the user a sense of spatial orientation. You can accomplish this by being consistent with your animations and keep your app structure simple to digest.

Consider an object that moves out of the screen to the left, if it reappears, logically, it should come from where it exited. This will help your users understand the app physiognomy and by consequence make them feel more comfortable when interacting with it. If you do it otherwise it will just create confusion and your users might even think that they're looking at a different object.

The same applies to the visual hints present in the screen. Imagine that you pressed a list item with an arrow pointing to the right, the logical transition should be a slide from right to left, as if the user view port was moving right, reinforcing the visual clue in the UI.
Many times you'll see the UI elements contradicting the transition. Personally I find this very annoying and I think it's something we should avoid, otherwise the animation will look intrusive to the users since it defies what they expected to happen.

Provide instant feedback

Have you ever asked yourself, did I press that button? Did it do anything? Should I press it again? The answer probably is yes and you probably pressed it again just to realise that you actually pressed it in the first place. That's why providing instant feedback is important, even if the app doesn't respond instantaneously.

In a world where your finger often covers the button you're pressing, animation plays a huge roll in providing the user the reassurance they need.

In some cases, you can even take it one step further and jazz it up a bit. Let's say you have a "star" button in your app which is one of your "hero" actions (never seen before, I know). This is exactly when you can be playful and delight your user. Make it feel rewarding and the user will want to repeat the action. Be mindful with time, the animation needs to feel instantaneous or it will become old and annoying soon. Also, don't jazz it up too much.

Make the content feel alive

If your app or website has live content, like pictures, comments or some sort of counter, animation can help you accomplish two things. Smooth the addition of new elements and cushion the possible delay of loading such elements.

Storytelling

In almost every application, there's a place where we need to explain something that went wrong or introduce a new feature. Illustrations play a huge roll here, providing a more visual and immediate way to understand a problem and how to fix it.
If an image is better than a thousand words, imagine an animation, that's like 30 images every second.

This type of screen is really the time and place where animation can shine, be memorable and bring a smile to the user's face, especially if something went wrong. However, if your app is constantly showing an error screen, then you might want to ignore this point. The last thing you need is for your user to remember all the times that error came up.

Now that you have some clues on when and where animation can be used we must proceed to the how.

3. Animation must reflect the brand

Consider a simple motion of an object from left to right. There are virtually endless ways to make this motion just by tweaking it's easing curve. With this you can add a personality to your animation. See the example below, all use the same animation and timing, the only difference is the easing curve.

The possibilities are endless but, before going crazy and make all your transitions bounce like gelatine, consider your brand, your user and the tone you want to transmit. If the animation doesn't fit the tone your users might feel out of place and lose their trust in your brand. Imagine if your banking app had the same bouncy style of animation you find in a game. Would you trust it?

It's important that your animation reflects the brand but something you must keep in mind when designing your animation is the next guideline.

4. Animation shouldn't be the hero

Animation is here to save the day, not like a standalone hero but more like the Ninja Turtles, fighting as a team playing on each other's strengths. If your animation takes the centre stage, you're not designing an experience, you're just forcing the user to watch a movie.

Animation needs to be part of the whole experience, complementing the visual design and a supporting the interactions, to achieve this restraint is key. In most cases a good animation is the one that users don't even notice.

If you're designing, your job is not to entertain the user but rather help him accomplish something in the easiest, most intuitive and natural way possible, and the next guideline comes to help with that.

5. Animation must feel natural

I know that the word "feel" might be ambiguous, but bear with me.
Since the user interacts directly with the UI there's a certain expectation that the UI follows, to a certain extent, rules of physics. A list that responds to the speed you've interacted with is a perfect example, but the same applies to other objects.

However, this doesn't mean that all the apps should react the same way. In the real world if you kick a ball they don't react the same way. A football will fly away but a bowling ball will probably just hurt your foot. As I mentioned in the previous guideline, it's all about the tone and the weight you want your brand to transmit.

You have to define what's your app's "material" and weight, and make it behave accordingly, but remember to always adjust it if necessary so it doesn't go against the next guideline.

6. Animation must not waste time

Animation can be used to tweak the user's perception of time, so use this in your favour. For the human brain, anything below 0.1 seconds will seem instantaneous and below 1 second will seem seamless. So, if you have a process that takes 6 seconds for instance, you can break it down in a few separate animations. This trick should make the process feel a lot faster and keep your user engaged.

You can also use animation to fake an instant action that will actually take bit longer in the background. This will make the app feel more responsive even though the process still takes longer than what the user sees.

You can't mimic everything in the real world, you need to take into account the user's expectations. If you press a button in the UI you expect an instant feedback, thus it's not the best place to apply physics, so don't ease-in an animation in cases like this.

Ok, if you made it this far I truly believe that, if you apply these guidelines, you're in a good path to make the best of animation and improve not only how your UI looks and feels but also how your user experiences it. Now that you know the guidelines, you still need to go over a few more jumps.

The last hurdles
There you have it, my 6 Animation Guidelines for UX Design. If this sparked your interest and you want to dive deeper in this subject I can recommend a few other articles and authors that inspired me to write this. I really hope that you find this article useful, I know that I'm not the first (or will be the last) to talk about animation in the UI, but I tried to take a slightly different approach, not focusing so much on how the animations looks like but rather how they can help the end user. I invite you to participate in the discussion in the comments below, I'm always interested to know your thoughts and happy to answer any questions you might have in your mind. Thanks for reading! :)
If you want your user engaged you need to provide a seamless experience and, if used right, animation can definitely help you to accomplish that. It's not going to be an easy journey though, as with anything design related you need to be prepared for an iterative process.
You also need to know how to prototype and collect feedback, if your colleagues lack the vocabulary it's going to be hard to communicate. They won't be able to comment on your animation without using an onomatopoeia (e.g. "That button could go more like swoosh and then kablam, you know?"), for that reason I think it's good to introduce people to the 12 basic principles of animation, so they get familiar with the terms allowing them to express themselves in a way that you can understand.

One last hurdle to go, the effort that your development team can/wants to put into animation. You really need to push through and show them that in a world where animation is becoming an intrinsic part of a good user experience the question is not if, but when are you going to have to catch up with the herd? The sooner you do it the better. Your user will appreciate it and you will reap the benefits.

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If you've read my Before I start, a little bit of context. In the beginning of 2015 I gave a presentation where I framed animation as an essential discipline to design a good user experience, I talked about the 12 basic principles of animation, underlining which ones make sense in UI animations and all that shebang.

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Today's top technology companies shine with what Forbes calls an "innovation premium" - additional value they generate in the stock market solely because of their reputation for disruption. ¹

They operate with a clearly articulated vision that drives every action and informs every decision. One that's understood across all levels of the organization and embodied by each employee. And most of the time that vision isn't about a simple app or social network.
These companies set out to change the world. And they succeed.
How do they do it? Tech titans know that it takes an innovative, agile work environment and culture to turn their ambitious visions into reality. They use technology to answer big questions and adapt quickly. They build teams that can outthink and outwork entire industries. And they solve problems in ways no one else has thought of, making all of our lives better in the process.

You know these names - they're impossible to miss - and you'll probably recognize their secrets to success aren't so secret after all. Any company, regardless of industry, can adopt these innovative strategies and be on their way to accelerating market leadership.

1. Create a movement from your business model like Tesla

What's in a name? Ask Tesla, which officially dropped "Motors" from its name in February 2017. The change is a better reflection of their simple yet very ambitious mission: To accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy.

Tesla's mission is at the heart of every business move, and those efforts extend well beyond cars. When Musk released a new version of his now-famous-master-plan, he used the company mission to justify what many considered a risky acquisition of SolarCity and officially pursuing energy storage. 3, 4 His blog post explained:

"The point of all this was, and remains, accelerating the advent of sustainable energy, so that we can imagine far into the future and life is still good."

Musk isn't just improving the future by making the seemingly impossible probable; he's open sourcing it.

In 2014, Musk announced the company would allow anyone - competitors included - to use Tesla's patented technology in hopes of accelerating development of electric vehicles. ⁵ The declaration, while uncommon, isn't surprising coming from a CEO leading a deeply purpose-driven company.

The takeaway: Leaders inspire when they focus their organizations on a crystal-clear mission and pivot the business accordingly.

2. Adopt an explorer's mentality like Amazon

There's a reason that Amazon topped Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies list in 2017. They're in constant innovation mode. With the customer experience as their North Star, employees are free - and encouraged - to risk failure until the right solution is found. ⁷

Says Bezos, "Some companies have more of a conqueror mentality. If you look at their annual strategic plan, it starts with their three top enemies, who they're going to crush this year. We have an explorer mentality, so we like to go pioneering." ⁸

Amazon's focus on invention keeps competitors at bay and the company growing fast: They hired 110,00 workers last year and now have more than 340,000 employees. ⁹ How does that kind of colossal company scale innovation? They use a simple "two pizza rule."

Paul Misener, VP of Innovation at Amazon, says the company has discovered that "extra expertise doesn't work" and larger groups end up creating more bureaucracy. ¹⁰ Teams working on a problem are kept small - small enough they can be fed by two pizzas, so they can "innovate and test their visions independently of everyone else." ¹¹

The takeaway: For agility and business growth, build small, nimble teams that feel safe taking risks in the name of inventiveness.

3. Move as fast as Facebook

Social media giant Facebook has used speed to thrive in their competitive market. It's fostered in many ways - from intense onboarding bootcamps for new hires to a deeply held commitment to ship code everyday. The mantra to "move fast and break things" is a phrase synonymous with Zuckerberg's management approach and the founding of Facebook itself.

Today their engineers are less about breaking things and more about "stable infrastructure." ¹³ But the edict to move fast remains: it's still one of Facebook's five core values. Prospective applicants are told the company is "less afraid of making mistakes than we are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly." ¹⁴

The acute sense of speed reinforces a philosophy Zuckerberg calls the "Hacker Way."

Hacking is a culture built on continuous improvement and individual ownership where engineering organizations remain relatively flat and employees understand that "nothing at Facebook is someone else's problem." ¹⁵

Nowhere is this environment more pronounced than in the nocturnal coding marathons where employees join forces to ship new products in a short amount of time. Facebook's famous hackathons have produced well-known features like Timeline, Chat and Safety Check. ¹⁶ This dedicated time to hack isn't going anywhere; Facebook proudly held its 10-year anniversary of hackathons in San Francisco in 2017. ¹⁷

The takeaway: Companies should support moving fast in a multitude of big and small ways and recognize that it takes each team member moving quickly to stay ahead.

4. Empower people like Atlassian

It's difficult to imagine now, but culture-obsessed co-founders Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar initially put off creating company values. Poor hiring choices at a critical business stage forced the pair to evaluate the kind of people they wanted to attract to the company. ¹⁹

Since then, the software darling has been laser focused on hiring and developing the best talent in the industry. They do this by encouraging cross-functional roles, providing learning resources where needed and staying true to their core mission to help teams.

Throughout Atlassian Summit, the company's product leaders explain how their engineering teams work more efficiently by sharing knowledge and skills with each other. For example, developers do more than just code. They work in tandem with QA to help test code themselves - a nod to the company's value "Be the change you seek." And every engineer takes a rotation working on only fixing bugs. ²⁰

What's the number one priority for developers who must flex new muscles in collaborative functions? Training. QA teams, developers and designers learn from each other to develop skills for optimal teamwork. These workshops are followed by thorough documentation, much of which can be accessed on their website for free by other teams looking to do the same.

The takeaway: Build a healthy culture and invest in the growth of your employees like your company depends on it-because it does.

5. Concentrate on collaboration like Google

It flies in the face of conventional thinking, but sometimes getting people in a room to just talk about ideas yields the most productivity. Just ask Mozilla. Or the United Nations. Both organizations - and many others - have adopted design sprints, which is Google's way of solving challenges at scale. 22, 23

"Sprint" is a loaded term in the engineering world. It means different things to different people. But Googlers have established their own form of sprint-style teamwork to keep pace with technology and product development today.

A design sprint at Google is a process for answering critical business questions with 5 distinct phases: Understand, Sketch, Decide, Prototype, and Validate. ²⁴ Teams are committed to solving their problem with a design in hand in 5 days or less. Design sprints are common for product features, but the company has also used the framework to improve their hiring process and map annual goals.

The success of design sprints relies heavily on cross-functional teams with diversity in background and skills being paramount. While some stakeholders may groan at the thought of working with people outside their departments, months of development can be condensed in a short meeting done right. ²⁵

"It's really our responsibility to get the right people in the room," says Ratna Desai, UX Lead at Google. "It's so important to have that filter when you start a design sprint, because it really shapes the end deliverable. I've seen teams where that kind of team synergy and that diversity has led to true innovation."

The takeaway: Leverage diverse teams to collectively problem solve and create better products and experiences in the process.

Learn, Succeed, Repeat

While the world's greatest tech companies thrive in areas like collaboration, speed and risk-taking, no single company claims to have it all figured out. And therein lies a key secret: Successful organizations continue to learn, adapt and change as technology advances and information grows out of date.

This agile way of being is most pronounced in a company's employees. Companies that equip their teams to achieve greatness are the ones who have global impact. Leaders should ask themselves: do my teams know their larger goals? Are they given the time to innovate? Are their skills keeping pace with technology?

If the answers to these questions are no, consider tactics from technology's heavy-hitters. And create space for your teams to develop new skills and ways of working. Dedicated learning enables your employees to develop skills that match their desire to innovate. With the right talent, your company will spend less time playing catch-up with competitors and more time succeeding in changing the world.

Sources
1 Forbes, 2 TechCrunch, 3 Tesla, 4 MarketWatch, 5 Tesla 2, 6 U.S Securities & Exchange Commission 1, 7 Amazon, 8 Business Insider 1, 9 GeekWire, 10 AWS Transformation Day, 11 Fast Company 1, 12 U.S Securities & Exchange Commission 2, 13 f8 2014, 14 Facebook, 15 Fast Company 2, 16 Business Insider 2, 17 Business Insider 3, 18 StartupSmart, 19 Atlassian Summit 2015, 20 Atlassian Summit 2014, 21 Bloomberg Businessweek, 22 Medium 1, 23 Medium 2, 24 Design Sprint Kit, 25 Google

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Innovation playbook: 5 traits of wildly successful tech companies you can adopt today

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Today's top technology companies shine with what Forbes calls an "innovation premium" - additional value they generate in the stock market solely because of their reputation for disruption. 1 They operate with a clearly articulated vision that drives every action and informs every decision.

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Users can be hesitant to fill out forms. That is why it is our goal as designers to make the process of filling out a form as easy as possible. Nick shares some techniques that can help you design effective forms.

(This article is kindly sponsored by Adobe.) Forms are the linchpin of all mobile interactions; it stands between the person and what they're looking for. Every day, we use forms for essential online activities. Recall the last time you bought a ticket, booked a hotel room or made a purchase online - most probably those interactions contained a step with filling out a form.

Forms are just a means to an end. Users should be able to complete them quickly and without confusion. In this article, you'll learn practical techniques that will help you design an effective form.

What Makes For An Effective Form

The primary goal with every form is completion. Two factors have a major impact on completion rate:

Perception of complexity
The first thing users do when they see a new form is estimate how much time is required to complete it. Users do this by scanning the form. Perception plays a crucial role in the process of estimation. The more complex a form looks, the more likely users will abandon the process.

Interaction cost
Interaction cost is the sum of efforts - both cognitive and physical - that the users put into interacting with an interface in order to reach their goal. Interaction cost has a direct connection with form usability. The more effort users have to make to complete a form, the less usable the form is. A high interaction cost could be the result of data that is difficult to input, an inability to understand the meaning of some questions, or confusion about error messages.

The Components Of Forms

A typical form has the following five components:

Input fields
These include text fields, password fields, checkboxes, radio buttons, sliders and any other fields designed for user input.

Field labels
These tell users what the corresponding input fields mean.

Structure
This includes the order of fields, the form's appearance on the page, and the logical connections between different fields.

Action buttons
The form will have at least one call to action (the button that triggers data submission).

Feedback
Feedback notifies the user about the result of an operation. Feedback can be positive (for example, indicating that the form was submitted successfully) or negative (saying something like, "The number you've provided is incorrect").

This article covers many aspects related to structure, input fields, labels, action buttons and validation. Most points mentioned in this article have visual do and don't examples; all such examples were created using Adobe XD.

Input Fields

When it comes to form design, the most important thing a designer can do is to minimize the need for typing. Reducing input effort is essential. Designers can achieve this goal by focusing on form field design.

Minimize The Total Number Of Fields

Every field you ask users to fill out requires some effort. The more effort is needed to fill out a form, the less likely users will complete the form. That's why the foundational rule of form design is shorter is better - get rid of all inessential fields.

Baymard Institute analyzed checkout forms and found that a too long or too complicated checkout process is one of the top reasons for abandonment during checkout. The study found that the average checkout contains almost 15 form fields. Most online services could reduce the number of fields displayed by default by 20 to 60%.

Many designers are familiar with the "less is more" rule; still, they ask additional questions in an attempt to gather more data about their users. It might be tempting to collect more data about your users during the initial signup, but resist that temptation. Think about it this way: With every additional field you add to your form, you increase the chance of losing a prospective user. Is the information you gain from a field worth losing new users? Remember that, as long as you've collected a user's contact information, you can always follow up with a request for more data.

Clearly Distinguish All Optional Fields

Before optimizing optional fields, ask yourself whether you really need to include them in your form. Think about what information you really need, not what you want. Ideally, the number of optional fields in your form should be zero.

If after a brainstorming session, you still want to include a few optional questions in your form, make it clear for users that those fields are optional:

Mark optional fields instead of mandatory ones.
If you ask as little as possible, then the vast majority of fields in your form will be mandatory. Therefore, mark only those fields in the minority. For instance, if five out of six fields are mandatory, then it makes sense to mark only one field as optional.

Use the "Optional" label to denote optional fields.
Avoid using the asterisk (*) to mean "optional." Not all users will associate the asterisk with optional information, and some users will be confused by the meaning (an asterisk is often used to denote mandatory fields).

Size Fields Accordingly

When possible, use field length as an affordance. The length of an input field should be in proportion to the amount of information expected in the field. The size of the field will act as a visual constraint - the user will know how much text is expected to be entered just by looking at the field. Generally, fields such as ones for area codes and house numbers should be shorter than ones for street addresses.

Offer Field Focus

Auto-focus the first input field in your form. Auto-focusing a field gives the user an indication and a starting point, so that they are able to quickly start filling out the form. By doing that, you reduce the interaction cost - saving the user one unnecessary tap.

Make the active input field prominent and focused. The field focus itself should be crystal clear - users should be able to understand at a glance where the focus is. It could be an accented border color or a fade-in of the box.

Don't Ask Users To Repeat Their Email Address

The reason why an extra field for the email address is so popular among product developers is apparent: Every company wants to minimize the risk of hard bounces (non-deliverables caused by invalid email addresses). Unfortunately, following this approach doesn't guarantee that you'll get a valid address. Users often copy and paste their address from one field to another.

Provide "Show Password" Option

Duplicating the password input field is another common mistake among product designers. Designers follow this approach because they believe it will prevent users from mistyping a password. In reality, a second field for a password not only increases interaction cost, but also doesn't guarantee that users will proceed without mistakes. Because users don't see what they've entered in the field, they can make the same mistake twice (in both fields) and will face a problem when they try to log in using a password. As Jakob Nielsen summarized:

Usability suffers when users type in passwords and the only feedback they get is a row of bullets. Typically, masking passwords doesn't even increase security, but it does cost you business due to login failures.

Instead of duplicating the password field, provide an option that allows users to view the password they have chosen to create. Have an icon or checkbox that unmasks the password when clicked. A password preview can be an opportunity for users to check their data before sending.

Don't Slice Data Fields

Do not slice fields when asking for a full name, phone number or date of birth. Sliced fields force the user to make additional taps to move to the next field. For fields that require some formatting (such as phone numbers or a date of birth), it's also better to have a single field paired with clear formatting rules as its placeholder.

Avoid Dropdown Menus

Luke Wroblewski famously said that dropdowns should be the UI of last resort. Dropdowns are especially bad for mobile because collapsed elements make the process of data input harder on a small screen: Placing options in a dropdown requires two taps and hides the options.

If you're using a dropdown for selection of options, consider replacing it with radio buttons. They will make all options glanceable and also reduce the interaction cost - users can tap on the item and select at once.

Use Placeholders And Masked Input

Formatting uncertainty is one of the most significant problems of form design. This problem has a direct connection with form abandonment - when users are uncertain of the format in which they should provide data, they can quickly abandon the form. There are a few things you can do to make the format clear.

Placeholder Text

The text in an input field can tell users what content is expected. Placeholder text is not required for simple fields such as "Full name", but it can be extremely valuable for fields that require data in a specific format. For example, if you design search functionality for tracking a parcel, it would be good to provide a sample tracking number as a placeholder for the tracking-number field.

It's vital that your form should have a clear visual distinction between the placeholder text and the actual value entered by the user. In other words, placeholder text shouldn't look like a preset value. Without clear visual distinction, users might think that the fields with placeholders already have values.

Masked Input

Field masking is a technique that helps users format inputted text. Many designers confuse field masking with placeholder text - they are not the same thing. Unlike placeholders, which are basically static text, masks automatically format the data provided by the user. In the example below, the parentheses, spaces and dashes appear on the screen automatically as a phone number is entered.

Masked input also makes it easy for users to validate information. When a phone number is displayed in chunks, it makes it easier to find and correct a typo.

Provide Matching Keyboard

Mobile users appreciate apps and websites that provide an appropriate keyboard for the field. This feature prevents them from doing additional actions. For example, when users need to enter a credit card number, your app should only display the dialpad. It's essential to implement keyboard matching consistently throughout the app (all forms in your app should have this feature).

Set HTML input types to show the correct keypad. Seven input types are relevant to form design:

input type="text" displays the mobile device's normal keyboard.

input type="email" displays the normal keyboard and '@' and '.com'.

input type="tel" displays the numeric 0 to 9 keypad.

input type="number" displays a keyboard with numbers and symbols.

input type="date" displays the mobile device's date selector.

input type="datetime" displays the mobile device's date and time selector.

input type="month" displays the mobile device's month and year selector.

Use A Slider When Asking For A Specific Range

Many forms ask users to provide a range of values (for example, a price range, distance range, etc.). Instead of using two separate fields, "from" and "to", for that purpose, use a slider to allow users to specify the range with a thumb interaction.

Clearly Explain Why You're Asking For Sensitive Information

People are increasingly concerned about privacy and information security. When users see a request for information they consider as private, they might think, "Hm, why do they need this?" If your form asks users for sensitive information, make sure to explain why you need it. You can do that by adding support text below relevant fields. As a rule of thumb, the explanation text shouldn't exceed 100 characters.

Be Careful With Static Defaults

Unlike smart defaults, which are calculated by the system based on the information the system has about users, static defaults are preset values in forms that are the same for all users. Avoid static defaults unless you believe a significant portion of your users (say, 95%) would select those values - particularly for required fields. Why? Because you're likely to introduce errors - people scan forms quickly, and they won't spend extra time parsing all of the questions; instead, they'll simply skip the field, assuming it already has a value.

Protect User Data

Jef Raskin once said, "The system should treat all user input as sacred." This is absolutely true for forms. It's great when you start filling in a web form and then accidentally refresh the page but the data remains in the fields. Tools such as Garlic.js help you to persist a form's values locally until the form is submitted. This way, users won't lose any precious data if they accidentally close the tab or browser.

Automate Actions

If you want to make the process of data input as smooth as possible, it's not enough to minimize the number of input fields - you should also pay attention to the user effort required for the data input. Typing has a high interaction cost - it's error-prone and time-consuming, even with a physical keyboard. But when it comes to mobile screens, it becomes even more critical. More typing increases the user's chance of making errors. Strive to prevent unnecessary typing, because it will improve user satisfaction and decrease error rates.

Here are a few things you can do to achieve this goal:

Autocomplete

Most users experience autocompletion when typing a question in Google's search box. Google provides users with a list of suggestions related to what the user has typed in the field. The same mechanism can be applied to form design. For example, a form could autocomplete an email address.

Autocapitalize

Autocapitalizing makes the first letter a capital automatically. This feature is excellent for fields like names and street addresses, but avoid it for password fields.

Autocorrect

Autocorrection modifies words that appear to be misspelled. Turn this feature off for unique fields, such as names, addresses, etc.

Auto-filling of personal details

Typing an address is often the most cumbersome part of any online signup form. Make this task easier by using the browser function to fill the field based on previously entered values. According to Google's research, auto-filling helps people fill out forms 30% faster.

Use The Mobile Device's Native Features To Simplify Data Input

Modern mobile devices are sophisticated devices that have a ton of amazing capabilities. Designers can use a device's native features (such as camera or geolocation) to streamline the task of inputting data.

Below are just a few tips on how to make use of sensors and device hardware.

Location Services

It's possible to preselect the user's country based on their geolocation data. But sometimes prefilling a full address can be problematic due to accuracy issues. Google's Places API can help solve this problem. It uses both geolocation and address prefilling to provide accurate suggestions based on the user's exact location.

Using location services, it's also possible to provide smart defaults. For example, for a "Find a flight" form, it's possible to prefill the "From" field with the nearest airport to the user based on the user's geolocation.

Biometric Authorization

The biggest problem of using a text password today is that most people forget passwords. 82% of people can't remember their passwords, and 5 to 10% of sessions require users to reset a password. Password recovery is a big deal in e-commerce. 75% of users wouldn't complete a purchase if they had to attempt to recover their password while checking out.

The future of passwords is no passwords. Even today, mobile developers can take advantage of biometric technologies. Users shouldn't need to type a password; they should be able to use biometric readers for authentication - signing in using a fingerprint or face scanning.

Camera

If your form asks users to provide credit card details or information from their driver's license, it's possible to simplify the process of data input by using the camera as a scanner. Provide an option to take a photo of the card and fill out all details automatically.

But remember that no matter how good your app fills out the fields, it's essential to leave them available for editing. Users should be able to modify the fields whenever they want.

Voice

Voice-controlled devices, such as Apple HomePod, Google Home and Amazon Echo, are actively encroaching on the market. The number of people who prefer to use voice for common operations has grown significantly. According to ComScore, 50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020.

As users get more comfortable and confident using voice commands, they will become an expected feature of mobile interactions. Voice input provides a lot of advantages for mobile users - it's especially valuable in situations when users can't focus on a screen, for example, while driving a car.

When designing a form, you can provide voice input as an alternative method of data input.

Field Labels

Write Clear And Concise Labels

The label is the text that tells users what data is expected from them in a particular input field. Writing clear labels is one of the best ways to make a form more accessible. Labels should help the user understand what information is required at a glance.

Avoid using complete sentences to explain. A label is not help text. Write succinct and crisp labels (a word or two), so that users can quickly scan your form.

Place The Label And Input Close Together

Put each label close to the input field, because the eye will visually know they're tied together.

Don't Use Disappearing Placeholder Text As Labels

While inline labels look good and save valuable screen estate, these benefits are far outweighed by the significant usability drawbacks, the most critical of which is the loss of context. When users start entering text in a field, the placeholder text disappears and forces people to recall this information. While it might not be a problem for simple two-field forms, it could be a big deal for forms that have a lot of fields (say, 7 to 10). It would be tough for users to recall all field labels after inputting data. Not surprisingly, user testing continually shows that placeholders in form fields often hurt usability more than help.

There's a simple solution to the problem of disappearing placeholders: the floating (or adaptive) label. After the user taps on the field with the label placeholder, the label doesn't disappear, it moves up to the top of the field and makes room for the user to enter their data.

Top-Align Labels

Putting field labels above the fields in a form improves the way users scan the form. Using eye-tracking technology for this, Google showed that users need fewer fixations, less fixation time and fewer saccades before submitting a form.

Another important advantage of top-aligned labels is that they provide more space for labels. Long labels and localized versions will fit more easily in the layout. The latter is especially suitable for small mobile screens. You can have form fields extend the full width of the screen, making them large enough to display the user's entire input.

Sentence Case Vs. Title Case

There are two general ways to capitalize words:

Title case: Capitalize every word. "This Is Title Case."

Sentence case: Capitalize the first word. "This is sentence case."

Using sentence case for labels has one advantage over title case: It is slightly easier (and, thus, faster) to read. While the difference for short labels is negligible (there's not much difference between "Full Name" and "Full name"), for longer labels, sentence case is better. Now You Know How Difficult It Is to Read Long Text in Title Case.

Avoid Using Caps For Labels

All-caps text  -  meaning text with all of the letters capitalized  -  is OK in contexts that don't involve substantive reading (such as acronyms and logos), but avoid all caps otherwise. As mentioned by Miles Tinker in his work Legibility of Print, all-capital print dramatically slows the speed of scanning and reading compared to lowercase type.

Layout

You know by now that users scan web pages, rather than read them. The same goes for filling out forms. That's why designers should design a form that is easy to scan. Allowing for efficient, effective scanning is crucial to making the process of the filling out a form as quick as possible.

Use A Single-Column Layout

A study by CXL Institute found that single-column forms are faster to complete than multi-column forms. In that study, test participants were able to complete a single-column form an average of 15.4 seconds faster than a multi-column form.

Multiple columns disrupt a user's vertical momentum; with multiple columns, the eyes start zigzagging. This dramatically increases the number of eye fixations and, as a result, the completion time. Moreover, multiple-column forms might raise unnecessary questions in the user, like "Where should I begin?" and "Are questions in the right column equal in importance to questions in the left one?"

In a one-column design, the eyes move in a natural direction, from top to bottom, one line at a time. This helps to set a clear path for the user. One column is excellent for mobile because the screens are longer vertically, and vertical scrolling is a natural motion for mobile users.

There are some exceptions to this rule. It's possible to place short and logically related fields on the same row (such as for the city and area code).

Create A Flow With Your Questions

The way you ask questions also matters. Questions should be asked logically from the user's perspective, not according to the application or database's logic, because it will help to create a sense of conversation with the user. For example, if you design a checkout form and asks for details such as full name, phone number and credit card, the first question should be for the full name. Changing the order (for example, starting with a phone number instead of a name) leads to discomfort. In real-world conversations, it would be unusual to ask for someone's phone number before asking their name.

Defer In-Depth Questions To The End

When it comes to designing a flow for questions you want to ask, think about prioritization. Follow the rule "easy before difficult" and place in-depth or personal questions last. This eases users into the process; they will be more likely to answer complex and more intrusive questions once they've established a rapport. This has a scientific basis: Robert Cialdini's principle of consistency stipulates that when someone takes a small action or step towards something, they feel more compelled to finish.

Group Related Fields Together

One of the principles of Gestalt psychology, the principle of proximity, states that related elements should be near each other. This principle can be applied to the order of questions in a form. The more related questions are, the closer they should be to each other.

Designers can group related fields into sections. If your form has more than six questions, group related questions into logical sections. Don't forget to provide a good amount of white space between sections to distinguish them visually.

Make A Long Form Look Simpler

How do you design a form that asks users a lot of questions? Of course, you could put all of the questions on one screen. But this hinder your completion rate. If users don't have enough motivation to complete a form, the form's complexity could scare them away. The first impression plays a vital role. Generally, the longer or more complicated a form seems, the less likely users will be to start filling in the blanks.

Minimize the number of fields visible at one time. This creates the perception that the form is shorter than it really is.

There are two techniques to do this.

Progressive Disclosure

Progressive disclosure is all about giving users the right thing at the right time. The goal is to find the right stuff to put on the small screen at the right time:

Initially, show users only a few of the most important options.

Reveal parts of your form as the user interacts with it.

Chunking

Chunking entails breaking a long form into steps. It's possible to increase the completion rate by splitting a form into a few steps. Chunking can also help users process, understand and remember information. When designing multi-step forms, always inform users of their progress with a completeness meter.

Designers can use either a progress tracker (as shown in the example above) or a "Step # out of #" indicator both to tell how many steps there are total and to show how far along the user is at the moment. The latter approach could be great for mobile forms because step indication doesn't take up much space.

Action Buttons

A button is an interactive element that direct users to take an action.

Make Action Buttons Descriptive

A button's label should explain what the button does; users should be able to understand what happens after a tap just by looking at the button. Avoid generic labels such as "Submit" and "Send", using instead labels that describe the action.

Don't Use Clear Or Reset Buttons

Clear or reset buttons allow users to erase their data in a form. These buttons almost never help users and often hurt them. The risk of deleting all of the information a user has entered outweighs the small benefit of having to start again. If a user fills in a form and accidentally hits the wrong button, there's a good chance they won't start over.

Use Different Styles For Primary And Secondary Buttons

Avoid secondary actions if possible. But if your form has two calls to action (for example, an e-commerce form that has "Apply discount" and "Submit order") buttons, ensure a clear visual distinction between the primary and secondary actions. Visually prioritize the primary action by adding more visual weight to the button. This will prevent users from tapping on the wrong button.

Design Finger-Friendly Touch Targets

Tiny touch targets create a horrible user experience because they make it challenging for users to interact with interactive objects. It's vital to design finger-friendly touch targets: bigger input fields and buttons.

The image below shows that the width of the average adult finger is about 11 mm.

According to material design guidelines, touch targets should be at least 48 × 48 DP. A touch target of this size results in a physical size of about 9 mm, regardless of screen size. It might be appropriate to use larger touch targets to accommodate a wider spectrum of users.

Not only is target size important, but sufficient space between touch targets matters, too. The main reason to maintain a safe distance between touch targets is to prevent users from touching the wrong button and invoking the wrong action. The distance between buttons becomes extremely important when binary choices such as "Agree" and "Disagree" are located right next to each other. Material design guidelines recommend separating touch targets with 8 DP of space or more, which will create balanced information density and usability.

Disable Buttons After Tap

Forms actions commonly require some time to be processed. For example, data calculation might be required after a submission. It's essential not only to provide feedback when an action is in progress, but also to disable the submit button to prevent users from accidentally tapping the button again. This is especially important for e-commerce websites and apps. By disabling the button, you not only prevent duplicate submissions, which can happen by accident, but you also provide a valuable acknowledgment to users (users will know that the system has received their submission).

Assistance And Support

Provide Success State

Upon successful completion of a form, it's critical to notify users about that. It's possible to provide this information in the context of an existing form (for example, showing a green checkmark above the refreshed form) or to direct users to a new page that communicates that their submission has been successful.

Errors And Validation

Users will make mistakes. It's inevitable. It's essential to design a user interface that supports users in those moments of failures.

While the topic of errors and validation deserves its own article, it's still worth mentioning a few things that should be done to improve the user experience of mobile forms.

Use Input Constraints for Each Field

Prevention is better than a cure. If you're a seasoned designer, you should be familiar with the most common cases that can lead to an error state (error-prone conditions). For example, it's usually hard to correctly fill out a form on the first attempt, or to properly sync data when the mobile device has a poor network connection. Take these cases into account to minimize the possibility of errors. In other words, it's better to prevent users from making errors in the first place by utilizing constraints and offering suggestions.

For instance, if you design a form that allows people to search for a hotel reservation, you should prevent users from selecting check-in dates that are in the past. As shown in the Booking.com example below, you can simply use a date selector that allows users only to choose today's date or a date in the future. Such a selector would force users to pick a date range that fits.

Don't Make Data Validation Rules Too Strict

While there might be cases where it's essential to use strict validation rules, in most cases, strict validation is a sign of lazy programming. Showing errors on the screen when the user provides data in a slightly different format than expected creates unnecessary friction. And this would have a negative impact on conversions.

It's very common for a few variations of an answer to a question to be possible; for example, when a form asks users to provide information about their state, and a user responds by typing their state's abbreviation instead of the full name (for example, CA instead of California). The form should accept both formats, and it's the developer job to convert the data into a consistent format.

Clear Error Message

When you write error messages, focus on minimizing the frustration users feel when they face a problem in interacting with a form. Here are a few rules on writing effective error messages:

Never blame the user.
The way you deliver an error message can have a tremendous impact on how users perceive it. An error message like, "You've entered a wrong number" puts all of the blame on the user; as a result, the user might get frustrated and abandon the app. Write copy that sounds neutral or positive. A neutral message sounds like, "That number is incorrect."

Avoid vague or general error messages.
Messages like "Something went wrong. Please, try again later" don't say much to users. Users will wonder what exactly went wrong. Always try to explain the root cause of a problem. Make sure users know how to fix errors.

Make error messages human-readable.
Error messages like "User input error: 0x100999" are cryptic and scary. Write like a human, not like a robot. Use human language, and explain what exactly the user or system did wrong, and what exactly the user should do to fix the problem.

Display Errors Inline

When it comes to displaying error messages, designers opt for one of two locations: at the top of the form or inline. The first option can make for a bad experience. Javier Bargas-Avila and Glenn Oberholzer conducted research on online form validation and discovered that displaying all error messages at the top of the form puts a high cognitive load on user memory. Users need to spend extra time matching error messages with the fields that require attention.

It's much better to position error messages inline. First, this placement corresponds with the user's natural top-to-bottom reading flow. Secondly, the errors will appear in the context of the user's input.

Use Dynamic Validation

The time at which you choose to display an error message is vital. Seeing an error message only after pressing the submit button might frustrate users. Don't wait until users finish the form; provide feedback as data is being entered.

Use inline validation with real-time feedback. This validation instantly tells people whether the information they've typed is compatible with the form's requirements. In 2009, Luke Wroblewski tested inline validation against post-submission validation and found the following results for the inline version:

22% increase in success rate,

22% decrease in errors made,

31% increase in satisfaction rating,

42% decrease in completion times,

47% decrease in the number of eye fixations.

But inline validation should be implemented carefully:

Avoid showing inline validation on focus.
In this case, as soon as the user taps a field, they see an error message. The error appears even when the field is completely empty. When an error message is shown on focus, it might look like the form is yelling at the user before they've even started filling it out.

Don't validate after each character typed.
This approach not only increases the number of unnecessary validation attempts, but it also frustrates users (because users will likely see error messages before they have completed the field). Ideally, inline validation messages should appear around 500 to 1000 milliseconds after the user has stopped typing or after they've moved to the next field. This rule has a few exceptions: It's helpful to validate inline as the user is typing when creating a password (to check whether the password meets complexity requirements), when creating a user name (to check whether a name is available) and when typing a message with a character limit.

Accessibility

Users of all abilities should be able to access and enjoy digital products. Designers should strive to incorporate accessibility needs as much as they can when building a product. Here are a few things you can do to make your forms more accessible.

Ensure The Form Has Proper Contrast

Your users will likely interact with your form outdoors. Ensure that it is easy to use both in sun glare and in low-light environments. Check the contrast ratio of fields and labels in your form. The W3C recommends the following contrast ratios for body text:

Small text should have a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 against its background.

Large text (at 14-point bold, 18-point regular and up) should have a contrast ratio of at least 3:1 against its background.

Measuring color contrast can seem overwhelming. Fortunately, some tools make the process simple. One of them is Web AIM Color Contrast Checker, which helps designers to measure contrast levels.

Do Not Rely On Color Alone To Communicate Status

Color blindness (or color vision deficiency) affects approximately 1 in 12 men (8%) and 1 in 200 women in the world. While there are many types of color blindness, the most common two are protanomaly, or reduced sensitivity to red light, and deuteranomaly, or reduced sensitivity to green light. When displaying validation errors or success messages, don't rely on color alone to communicate the status (i.e. by making input fields green or red). As the W3C guidelines state, color shouldn't be used as the only visual means of conveying information, indicating an action, prompting a response or distinguishing a visual element. Designers should use color to highlight or complement what is already visible. Support colorblind people by providing additional visual cues that help them understand the user interface.

Allow Users To Control Font Size

Allow users to increase font size to improve readability. Mobile devices and browsers include features to enable users to adjust the font size system-wide. Also, make sure that your form has allotted enough space for large font sizes.

Test Your Design Decisions

All points mentioned above can be considered as industry best practices. But just because something is called a "best practice" doesn't mean it is always the optimal solution for your form. Apps and websites largely depend on the context in which they are used. Thus, it's always essential to test your design decisions; make sure that the process of filling out a form is smooth, that the flow is not disrupted and that users can solve any problems they face along the way. Conduct usability testing sessions on a regular basis, collect all valuable data about user interactions, and learn from it.

Conclusion

Users can be hesitant to fill out forms. So, our goal as designers is to make the process of filling out a form as easy as possible. When designing a form, strive to create fast and frictionless interactions. Sometimes a minor change - such as properly writing an error message - can significantly increase the form's usability.
This article is part of the UX design series sponsored by Adobe. Adobe XD is made for a fast and fluid UX design process, as it lets you go from idea to prototype faster. Design, prototype and share - all in one app. You can check out more inspiring projects created with Adobe XD on Behance, and also sign up for the Adobe experience design newsletter to stay updated and informed on the latest trends and insights for UX/UI design.

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Best Practices For Mobile Form Design - Smashing Magazine

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Users can be hesitant to fill out forms. That is why it is our goal as designers to make the process of filling out a form as easy as possible. In this article, I'll share a number of practical techniques that are bound to help you design effective forms.

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I wrote the book on user-friendly design. What I see today horrifies me

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I wrote the book on user-friendly design. What I see today horrifies me

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More people than ever are living long, healthy lives. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the average life expectancy is 78.6 years for men and 81.1 for women. More relevant, however, is that as people grow older, their total life expectancy increases. So for those who are now 65, the average life expectancy is 83 for men and over 85 for women. And because I'm 83, I'm expected to live past 90 (but I'm aiming a lot higher than that). And these are averages, which means that perhaps half of us will live even longer.

Those of us who are still active and healthy at advanced ages-I qualify-discover that we aren't quite as capable as our younger selves. That doesn't mean that we aren't healthy and workable-I still have a very active job and travel on business around the world, but I have to admit that I'm getting slower and weaker, with diminished eyesight, hearing, taste, touch, and, well, almost everything physical. The number of active, healthy oldsters is large-and increasing. We are not a niche market. And businesses should take note: We are good customers often with more free time and discretionary income than younger people.

Despite our increasing numbers the world seems to be designed against the elderly. Everyday household goods require knives and pliers to open. Containers with screw tops require more strength than my wife or I can muster. (We solve this by using a plumber's wrench to turn the caps.) Companies insist on printing critical instructions in tiny fonts with very low contrast. Labels cannot be read without flashlights and magnifying lenses. And when companies do design things specifically for the elderly, they tend to be ugly devices that shout out to the world "I'm old and can't function!" We can do better.

What older consumers want and need

As we age, we have more experience with life, which can make us better decision-makers and managers. Crystalized intelligence, it is called, and it gets better with experience. A caveat is that we often face physical changes that designers fail to account for into their work.

Vision deteriorates. The lens of our eyes harden, making focusing more difficult. I used to be able to read tiny text by holding it close to my eyes, but my inability to focus at close distances defeats that activity. Floaters and debris start accumulating inside the eye, which scatters the light on its way to the retina, reducing contrast and making it more difficult to see small, low-contrast objects. For the increasing number of people who have cataract surgery, the eye's lenses have ben replaced with plastic, which usually have a fixed focus. (Artificial lenses that can be focused are under development.) A flashlight has become an essential item, whether the one built into many phones or carried separately, because illumination makes tiny type easier to read although even then, a magnifying glass might be useful.

Hearing decreases. High frequencies are first to go, which also tends to impair directional sensitivity, which in turn makes it more difficult to attend to someone in a crowded, noisy environment. Loud restaurants are torture. So, more and more, my wife and I select restaurants by their noise level rather than by their food quality. At home while watching TV, whether shows, streaming events, or movies, we always turn on the captions, which often block critical parts of the image. Even worse, when a film shows someone speaking in a foreign language, the film often translates the words, but so too does the closed captioning, and the two are placed on top of one another, making both attempts to help the viewer completely unhelpful.

Bad design abounds

The problems I face are much milder than those faced by millions of aging people. With so many of us needing better devices, why are so many things still designed in ways that defeat our ability to function?

Take the screen design for Apple's phones. The designers at Apple apparently believe that text is ugly, so it should either be eliminated entirely or made as invisible as possible. Bruce Tognazzini and I, both former employees of Apple, wrote a long article on Apple's usability sins ,which has been read by hundreds of thousands of people. Once Apple products could be used without ever reading a manual. Today, Apple's products violate all the fundamental rules of design for understanding and usability, many of which Tognazzini and I had helped develop. As a result, even a manual is not enough: all the arbitrary gestures that control tablets, phones, and computers have to be memorized. Everything has to be memorized.

These thoughtless, inappropriate designs are not limited to Apple. New technologies tend to rely on display screens, often with tiny lettering, with touch-sensitive areas that are exceedingly difficult to hit as eye-hand coordination declines. Physical controls are by far the easiest to control-safer too, especially in safety-critical tasks such as driving a car, but they are disappearing. Why? To save a few cents in manufacturing and in a misplaced desire to be trendy. Speech can be a useful substitute for physical controls, though not as helpful as proponents claim.

Then there's the aesthetic problem. When products are developed for the elderly, they tend to be ugly and an unwanted signal of fragility. As a result, people who need walkers or canes often resist. Once upon a time, a cane was stylish: Today it is seen as a medical device. Why can't we have walkers and canes for everyday use, to help us in everyday life, to carry our packages, provide a way to sit when we are tired, or viewing some event, and yes, to maintain our balance? Make them items of pride, stylish enough that everyone will want one.

Everyone needs better design

Do not think that thoughtful design is just for the elderly, or the sick, or the disabled. In the field of design, this is called "inclusive design" for a reason: It helps everyone. Curb cuts were meant to help people who had trouble walking, but it helps anyone wheeling things: carts, baby carriages, suitcases. Closed captions are used in noisy bars. As Kat Holmes points out in her book all of us are disabled now and then. Some of us have permanent disabilities, but all of us have suffered from situational and temporary problems. When outside in the sun, the text message that just arrived is unreadable: wouldn't it be nice if the display, whether cellphone, watch, or tablet, could switch to large, higher contrast lettering? Are elderly people handicapped? Maybe, but so is a young, athletic parent while carrying a baby on one arm and a bag of groceries in the other (and perhaps trying to open their car door). Ride-share bicycles and scooters cannot be used by people who need to carry bulky packages. Everyone has difficulty hearing people in noisy environments. Noise-canceling headphones are for everyone, not just the elderly. Almost anything that will help the elderly population will end up helping everyone.

The promise of good design

Jeremy Myerson, a designer at London's Royal College of Art (and a good friend) curated an enticing exhibit at London's Design Museum entitled "New Old," that explored the potential for design and designers to enhance the experience of our later lives (described in this Fast Company article " Why you should be designing for your 73-year-old self). Walkers, scooters, and shopping carts for the elderly tend to lack any semblance of grace or elegance. Not so the "scooter for life," designed by the British firm PriestmanGoode, which has three wheels for stability and a sleek pouch for storing groceries.

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I wrote the book on user-friendly design. What I see today horrifies me

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More people than ever are living long, healthy lives. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the average life expectancy is 78.6 years for men and 81.1 for women. More relevant, however, is that as people grow older, their total life expectancy increases.

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Page A has more links from pages of similar quality than Page B; thus, it has more ranking "authority."

Proper image size (and we're talking dimensions here, not file size) is going to vary depending on your CMS, as well as the format of the page on which you're uploading the image. Look up dimension best practices for your CMS ( Shopify, for instance, recommends using 2048 x 2048 pixels for square product photos) before uploading your images. An image that looks like it fits nicely with your content ...

... might actually have been automatically resized by your CMS to fit. This resizing corrects the dimension for display-this will not reduce the file size. And generally speaking, images with more pixels will have greater file sizes. That means that the surest way to make sure that you're using the correct images sizes is to get a handle on your site's optimal image size and then crop images before you upload them. If that sounds like an arduous process-well, it can be if you're getting images from around the web. But if you're downloading stock images, or outsourcing product images to a designer, you'll do well to find a standard size that's geared for your specific site.

Stock photos are easy for sizing-most of the images you'll download from Adobe Stock or Shutterstock or other vendors are going to come in sizes that are friendly to most sites. But stock photos aren't always as effective as original, branded creative. Curated graphs based upon in-house data or high-quality shots of your product in action, on the other hand-these are the kinds of images that get shared on social media and searched for with reverse image searches.

Most importantly: Unique, compelling images are necessary to make your page original and valuable for your user. And time and time again, when the experts at Google are asked for a prescription for strong SEO, or for a response to a particular shift in Google's algorithm that has caused a drop in rankings, they say this: Create pages that are above all valuable for your audience. That means using images that will help users get the best experience possible from your pages.

Alt text: Alt text is helpful from a user experience standpoint for people using screenreaders or if your server gets tripped up and can't load the image (the alt text will still show on the page).

But in terms of ranking, alt text is the primary means by which Google understands what your image is -so, naturally, it's huge. As a best practice, include the page's target keyword and any ancillary keywords that might apply to a specific image, and omit anything language that is not descriptive (articles, etc.)

Titles: There has been much debate over whether image titles are necessary in conjunction with alt text. But they are ranking factors, insofar as Google does use them when determining the order in which to provide images in image search.

Captions: Here's what Google has to say about captions: "Google extracts information about the subject matter of the image from the content of the page, including captions and image titles." So, essentially, placing your image near relevant text is going to help Google determine what that image is. Using captions are a bulletproof way to make sure your image is described adequately and in context.

Let's talk about Open Graph tags and/or Twitter Cards. These are tags within your page's HTML that ensure when someone shares that page on Facebook or Twitter, images and descriptive snippets are displayed correctly. Naturally, this is huge if you want your images to gain steam on social media and drive traffic and strong social signals back to your site.

Aside from having a catchy name, lazy loading can go a ways in increasing page speed by not loading below the fold images until your users scrolls down to them. Take it from Google: Lazy loading can significantly speed up loading on long pages that include many images below the fold by loading them either as needed or when the primary content has finished loading and rendering. That's about as good an endorsement as you can get.

Google also endorses lazy loading in its very own PageSpeed Insights. You may run into this recommendation when you're running page speed analysis on your own site.

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Page A has more links from pages of similar quality than Page B; thus, it has more ranking "authority." Proper image size (and we're talking dimensions here, not file size) is going to vary depending on your CMS, as well as the format of the page on which you're uploading the image.

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Designing for Persuasion, Emotion and Trust

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Designing for Persuasion, Emotion and Trust

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T he next loop of User Experience is about designing for persuasion, emotion, and trust. You still need good usability, but it's often not enough to design a website that is easy to understand, navigate, and interact. Just because people can do something does not guarantee that they will - they must be motivated and persuaded to make decisions that lead to conversion. PET Design is rooted in social psychology and it's pioneered by Human Factors Inc. It complements classic usability and user experience best practice. In this article I'm going to give an overview of Design for Persuasion, Emotion and Trust (PET Design) and take a look at some PET techniques in detail.

Currently I'm working as a user experience architect at Nortal, but I started my career as a freelance graphic designer more than 12 years ago. Like many others, I created hundreds upon hundreds of web pages as a freelancer, but I have to admit I more often than not felt like a mere tool... a hammer in the client's hands. They might have wanted me to blindly copy big brands, for example design an Audi or Chevrolet style site for a small auto dealer, even though the users of the site might have been looking for something else entirely. I wasn't too happy about it.

So after a while I realized that by designing I would love to solve real problems, and that site's or user interface's design is nothing without the power of ease-of-use. So I began my journey in the usability world. And yay... I was happy. But... of course, there's a but.

In the beginning of 2010, I was working with a team, which was creating a new service for the Lithuanian National Library. It was a superb and innovative service, which let everyone order electronic or paper copies of books and documents from public libraries anywhere in Lithuania.

The team made a very detailed user analysis, provided comprehensive wireframes, created almost 200 different layouts in Photoshop, conducted usability testings... the service was excellent and it worked well. At the end of the project we were waiting for a big success, but... the service wasn't as popular as we expected. We were baffled and wanted to know why. We found, by applying traditional usability techniques we can enhance efficiency, but just because people can do something does not guarantee that they will - they must be motivated and persuaded.

Usability is no longer enough

In short, usability stands for can do, but shouldn't we be asking if they will do? For example, everyone can do sports, but does everyone do sports? (No.) We, as designers, must find a way to engage and persuade people to act.
We realized that usability was no longer enough. We had to step forward into the new world of user experience and emotional & persuasive design.

I started digging into social psychology and found that there are a lot of studies on engagement and persuasion. And it is not all that new.

Offline retailers had been using similar tools for years.

To my surprise I found that persuasive design had been used for years before the first studies.

For example, this is a voting ballot from the year before the start of World War II. The text reads: "Do you agree with the reunification of Austria with the German Reich that was enacted on 13 March 1938, and do you vote for the party of our leader Adolf Hitler?" The large centered circle is labeled "Yes", the smaller "No". From the viewpoint of an Austrian or German voter at the time, there's no doubt, which answer was more persuasive.

I wanted to find out more about this technique, so I kept digging and searching for something more.

PET Design™ toolkit

And accidently I found a wonderful PET Design™ toolkit by Human Factors International.

The toolkit was rooted in social psychology and consists of over 70 techniques for making user experiences more engaging, compelling, and effective. PET Design™ adds a layer of psychology to "gently nudge" potential customers towards your stated goal.

Now I'm going to take a look at PET Design™, but before I start, I would like to warn you: some concepts may sound cynical, manipulative or exploitative. And they could be used for evil purposes... (I'll show you some of these later). Remember: it's only a toolset. How you use it depends on you.

Alright, the PET Design™ toolkit is about designing for persuasion, emotion and trust.

Trust techniques are for establishing credibility, providing assurances and removing risk.

Emotion is a prime determinant of the sense of subjective well-being. Emotion-based techniques are about eliciting a desired emotional response during a process.

And the last one - persuasion techniques - the triggers to an action. These techniques relate to the mechanics.

To illustrate the techniques, I downloaded free a PSD eCommerce website template from Pixelhint and added some graphics from Design by Humans. So it's not a real shop.

Let's pretend we are the designers of La Shoopa e-shop, and we are selling t-shirts which are made by designers. Our goal is to sell more.

Honestly, there's nothing wrong with this design. It's perfectly good usability design, but we can make it much more persuasive by adding some additional details.

The toolkit says that we must address trust first. It's what's most essential. Trust is influenced by a combination of factors, which act as Trust Markers. There are 16 different trust markers:

1. Credible Organization

2. Domain Name

3. Design Quality

4. Match Existing Knowledge

5. FAQ

6. Citations

7. Current Content

8. Extensive Content

9. Archives

10. Links

11. Physical Address

12. Policies That Show Trust

13. Certifications & Awards

14. Testimonials

15. Famous People & Common People

16. Peer Advice and Service Comments

So I used those markers and tried to make La Shoopa better.

First of all, I changed the color of all the links. Everyone knows that links are usually blue. So I applied (1) the trust maker Match Existing Knowledge and changed each link's color to blue.

Later, to enhance trust, I added the footer with some sections:

(2) Additional pages like Rules, Refunds, Track Order, Contact Us and trust markers like Policies that show trust, FAQ, Physical Address help to ensure users that you're running a credible company and earn more trust from users.

(3) Usually the seller knows his products best. So don't hesitate to show your knowledge and experience by providing Extensive Content.

(4) If someone has written about you, don't be shy and let people know about it with Testimonials. If people trust TechCrunch, they will probably trust you.

(5) Certifications & Awards, even logos of Visa, MasterCard show credibility: if somebody has certified or awarded you, it implies that they know and trust you.

The situation was changed a bit for the better. I left some markers for you to think about after reading this article.

Optimal level of dissonance

We can use the Intrinsic Motivation technique - the optimal level of dissonance.

The optimal level of dissonance means that we should present something that seems a bit unusual, but not too unusual. For example, if a t-shirt made by a designer usually costs $50, we can draw the customer's attention to the fact that our t-shirts cost under $30.

Reason for Request

If you give people a reason for making a decision, they will also be more likely to make that decision. So I added a reason: Everyone needs some inspiration.

Contrast

One of the most powerful things we can do is help the customer see the value of something. We don't have an internal value meter that tells us how much everything is worth, so we always evaluate things in comparison to other things.

Another thing about contrast: When scanning for visual information we are automatically drawn toward things that stand out. What do you want people to focus on? Let's rearrange the blocks.

Let's add even more contrast and use the power of Paradox of choice.

Freedom of choice is critical for us, but researches show that more choices lead to lower overall sales. We only think we want more choice, but we are confused by too many choices and then we might not make any decision at all. So let's limit the choices. In this example I removed one t-shirt.

Good enough? No? Let's move on then.

Social proof

People will do things that they see other people are doing. We assume that popular things are things that are worthwhile. So I added a badge: Top 1

Does the t-shirt really have to be the Top 1 shirt? As a designer I've seen many examples of fake social proof, e.g. items marked as popular, because there's a stockpile of those unpopular items and they need to be sold. At some point one of your customers will notice that you are lying, and regaining trust is much harder than earning it in the first place.

Extrinsic reward

We can give people something that motivates them take action. For example, 25 bonus points.

Scarcity

People want what they may not be able to get in the future. We assign value to something that has limited availability or is promoted as being scarce. I added a label, which says: Only one day left.
WARNING: Overuse can devalue this technique.

The power of free things

One of the most powerful techniques available in the HFI toolkit is giving away a free product or service. Don't you just love free stuff?

Feel Good + Argue against self-interest + Popular brand

If you give people a reason for making a decision, they will also be more likely to make that decision. If I buy t-shirt, it will help lions. Wow!

It's an argument against self-interest and the popular brand of National Geographic helps a lot.

Social learning

We are influenced by others, especially by people like us or people we respect. So let's use it and add a comment near product.

Peer Advice

As I mentioned before, we trust our friends more than advertising. So we should find a way to persuade customers to advise each other. For these purposes, we can use a recommendation form and promise some discounts.

Honestly, I love recommendations and they really work, even though I dislike pop-up windows, which cover the content.

Written Public Statement + Visceral Processing

Written Public Statement. We are very consistent creatures. If you promise something, you will do it. So if we ask people to put something down in writing, they are much more likely to follow through with that later.

Visceral Processing  - "The way our brains automatically respond to stimuli, like bright saturated colours and smooth objects.

For those two principles I added a gift finder form and a bright red banner.

Summary

So in the end, we have almost the same design, but second one certainly persuades you to buy a t-shirt more than the previous one.

And to conclude I'd like to use a quote from user experience design guru Lou Carbone:

"You cannot NOT have an experience so learn how to make it a memorable one."

The Dark Side

And now the dark side. As mentioned, every tool can be used for both good and bad. By using PET Design™ or any other persuasive design technique you can encourage and slightly nudge users to take action or even trick them into doing things.

Let's look at a few examples, which show how the same techniques were used for bad.

Overuse

Ling's cars is a perfect example, which shows what will you get if you overuse persuasive design techniques. P.S. They became famous among designers and it seems that it was a particular marketing goal, but I think you'll agree that it's horrible.

No contrast

With a solid understanding of human psychology and persuasive design techniques Ryanair tricked users into buying insurance.

The power of free things + No Contrast

The power of free things. Badoo offers you free Super Powers (sounds cool, yeah?) to stay with them.

No contrast. "Delete your profile" is not very visible on screen.

The power of free things + Miscommunication

As you can see "free" RedSave Trial Pass was added without your permission. Even more - the pass is free for only 30 days and then you will be charged automatically.

The real dark side

Some companies went deeper into the dark side. LinkedIn tried to use some dark techniques. The result - the company is going to be paying for it as part of a class-action lawsuit, to the tune of $13 million. The problem with using dark persuasive techniques is so big that some countries decided to regulate them. For example, some dark patterns are now illegal in UK.

Your choice. Would you join the dark side?

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Designing for Persuasion, Emotion and Trust

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T he next loop of User Experience is about designing for persuasion, emotion, and trust. You still need good usability, but it's often not enough to design a website that is easy to understand, navigate, and interact. Just because people can do something does not guarantee that they will - they must be motivated and persuaded to make decisions that lead to conversion.

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What is the best way to improve growth in your business?

Apart from adopting the latest technology and tools, improving live chat customer experience is also a top priority. A study by White House Office of Consumer Affairs found that 80% of U.S. customers would pay more for a product or service to ensure a superior customer experience.

So, the question is which channel provides the most ROI when it comes to delivering the best customer experience? As per Forrester report , 30% of customers expect live chat on your website. The bottom line is that live chat by far is the most important channel to improve customer experience and boost customer satisfaction.

Customer experience (CX) is the pulse of every business. It touches all facets of the business ranging from customer satisfaction, loyalty and brand positioning.

9 ways live chat improves customer experience (CX)

has many benefits to boost sales conversion and accelerate the growth of your business. Let's discuss 9 ways that live chat can be used to improve customer satisfaction and provide a better customer experience.

1. Live chat converts your website visitors into leads

Website is the main source for your brand image. Visitors interact first with your brand through the website. Live chat offers a great opportunity to engage website visitors while they are on your site and increase conversions.

In fact, it can increase website conversions by 45% because all you're really doing is offering instant customer service.

How to use live chat for sales and lead generation to improve customer experience?

With live chat, businesses can track their website visitors and effectively convert them into leads by triggering right and timely messages. If you offer better customer experience to your first time visitors, they will become your potential customers. According to Emarketer, 63% of customers were more likely to return to a website that offers live chat.

Integrating live chat with CRM software collects and stores information such as contact details, order history from all the website visitors and customers to build customer profiles. It becomes easy for your agents to access the customer profiles when they return to chat again.
Tips:
2. Live chat reduces the response time

Response time is identified as the time between the chat made by the customer and when it is responded to. It is one of the important attributes of good customer service. research finds 59% of customers are more likely to buy when brands answer their queries in under a minute.

Live chat can reduce the response time in different ways:

Comprehend customer problems and offer resolutions easily by using live engagement tools

With real time visitor monitoring, you track your visitor's activity to offer a customized solution and reduces the second contact.

Identify the nature of the problem and deliver correct resolution in the first contact itself.

Use canned responses to make chat conversations effective and help customers in quick decision making.

Live chat offers a faster response as compared to other communication channels such as email, phone or social. Less response time means better customer satisfaction. Delayed response time is one of the top 3 reasons why customers leave your website.
Tips:
3. Make use of chatbots to automate your live chat support

With chatbots, you can improve live chat customer satisfaction by handling queries round the clock. Chatbots help to automate your repetitive activities such as information collection or answering common queries thus letting your human agents to focus their time on more complex issues.

Innovation & Digital Transformation leader Oliver Laborde says "Chatbots are making their way into the landscape of customer relations with the opportunity and promise to offer a better customer experience.

"Chatbots are key tools of good integrated customer experiences." - Olivier Ezratty

Bots help to improve customer experience by following ways:

24×7 support - With chatbots, businesses can engage their customers 24×7. When the chat representatives are not available chatbots take care of chats conversations.

Reduce your help desk support tickets: Chatbots takes care of all the basic queries (like asking the delivery date). It means less help desk tickets will be raised.

Collect customer information: Apart from chatting with humans, chatbots also help to collect customer data such as name, email, etc. that is further analyzed and processed as per requirements.

Human support for complex queries - When bots are not able to answer complex queries, bots transfer the conversation to the right service in the first attempt, avoiding redirections.
Tips:
For example, Funds tiger launches chatbot for loans purpose.

4. Live chat delivers interactive customer engagement

Customer Think says customer satisfaction ratings for live chat are often higher than all other support channels, likely because of the speed and conversational nature, with chat being the preferred support channel by millennials.

Live chat software helps to communicate instantly without letting the customer wait for a long time. The chat conversations can be made interactive by using face to face video chat and co-browsing for better live chat customer experience.

Combining live chat with co-browsing and video chat helps resolution of the query in an interactive and meaningful manner.

It reduces the total number of touchpoints to get an accurate solution.

Live chat customer experience develops trust and loyalty with personalized chats.

Tips:
Co-browsing solution helps the customer service agents to interact and guide the customers in order to deliver better customer experience. Find out how interactive customer engagement benefits the customers:

5. Humanize your live chat customer experience

Do you remember how many times you reached out to a company's help desk number and all you got was an annoying robotized voice repeating the instructions?

Live chat is one of the best tools that can humanize your customer support. With live chat, you are free from such an annoying robotic experience and you get connected with a human agent for personalized support.

Precisely, this is one of the crucial reasons why 92% of clients feel satisfied while using live chat for customer support.

Live chat is conversational - Live chat allows agents to make conversations interactive and meaningful by using video chat and co-browsing solution. The face to face interaction allows quick resolution in the first contact.
Tips:
Live chat has personalized touch - Live chat helps to personalize the conversation, greetings and visitors information that builds trust in customers.

How may I help you?

Can I help you in taking a closer look at the products?

Are you happy browsing or do you need some assistance?

So how live chat brings a human touch to improve the conversation customer experience?

6. Live chat helps to collect instant feedback

Improve the quality of products and services

Measure the live chat customer satisfaction level

Enhance your customer communication strategies

Improve customer retention

Running a business means to please your customers, meet their requirements and keep them loyal to your brand. At the same time learning customer's opinions is equally important to deliver the best customer experience . Feedbacks helps to identify the gaps between customers and businesses.

Customer feedback plays a vital role in many business facets:

Customer feedback also helps you to improve the products and services of your brand to better suit the needs of your customers.

End of chat conversation - At the end of every live chat session, you can ask customers to rate their chat experience.

During the product tour - When the customer is within the product you can ask them to provide their opinions.

After transaction checkout - When there is a successful transaction checkout ask the customer to provide his feedback.

Live chat is an important channel for customer feedback and gaining more preference because it is the best way to ask customer feedback through rating customer service. Asking customer feedback immediately after a demo or live chat session is the best practice.
Tips:
It is important to know the right time for asking feedback questions to your customers.

Measuring customer satisfaction comes down to collecting customer feedback via different methods (surveys, polls). You can receive customer feedback through email or during a live chat with rating view after the session.

7. Live chat support boosts customer satisfaction

Live chat has the lowest queue time compared to other customer service channels.

Live chat allows multiple conversations by making it a cost-effective support channel.

With live chat, conversations are routed across the right departments and agents quick resolution.

Live chat allows to begin a proactive conversation with customers and help them in their journey

Tips:
Offering real time customer service is one of the best features of live chat that boosts customer experience. The ability to have questions answered right away or log an issue and know someone is working on it gives a great feeling to customers.
In-app messages boost engagement by 3x! - Localytics
Live chat is the most preferred software because it offers real time customer service. So why live chat is your biggest support channel? There are a few factors:

8. Live chat for in-app customer retention
Tips:
Providing in-app support, right inside your web or mobile app, is a great way to drive higher user engagement and product support. If you are a SaaS product, there are high chances that your customers may look for help when they are inside your product.

So when it comes to delivering great customer experience, quality product support is one of the key factors for a software business that drives their customer retention. There are few areas where live chat messaging is a key contributor in increasing your customer retention

Tasks automation - If your team spends 4 hours every day on the same tasks - by automating the tasks will save 200 hours exactly. The hours gained through automation can be utilized for improving customer experience.

Use advanced analytics - Live chat allows tracking, viewing, monitoring the agents and team performance. Using live engagement tools makes conversations interactive and effective.

Sounds a bit exaggerating? Well, as per walker , customer experience will surpass these attributes as a key differentiator by 2020.
Tips:
9. Live chat increases team productivity

Using live chat to your business greatly impacts your business. It allows instant connection with the customers and hassle free resolution with live engagement tools. Automating the tasks reduces the manual intervention and extra hours gained can be used to provide better customer service to improve the customer experience.

Employing such strategies helps to boost team productivity that will influence customer experience.

Final thoughts on how live chat improves customer experience for higher satisfaction

Customer experience (CX) is a critical factor in the success of your business. A business with great CX is better able to satisfy customers and assures they continue to return again in the future. Customer experience must be evaluated through the complete service delivery chain starting from initial customer contact to remote support to on-site technician service, and follow-up.

To improve CX brands must develop best-in-class processes, create new and unique ways of interacting with customers, and invest in technology to optimize these touch points. With live chat, you open gateways for customers to reach you instantly and improve live chat customer experience.

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How Live Chat Improves Customer Experience (with Examples)

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What is the best way to improve growth in your business? Apart from adopting the latest technology and tools, improving live chat customer experience is also a top priority. A study by White House Office of Consumer Affairs found that 80% of U.S.

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Every website needs to prioritize link building. Regardless of your business type or industry, backlinks help drive more traffic to your website and are great for SEO purposes.

So where should you start?

Resource pages need to be a major component of your link building strategy. In fact, 56% of webmasters say that they use resource pages to build backlinks.

This strategy is second only to content creation in terms of the most popular ways to build links. Why is this case?

That's because the sole purpose of resource pages is to link out to other websites, which makes this an easy process. All you need to do is find authority resource pages that are related to your site, and then convince the webmasters to add your site to their page.

It's actually not that complex when you know how to approach it.

I've dealt with so many website owners who have identified the need for building quality links, but they just don't know how to do it. That was my inspiration for this guide.

I'll show you the best ways to build quality links specifically from resource pages.

Find relevant resource pages

This needs to be your first step. You can't just sit back and hope that your website will get picked up by resource pages. That type of passive strategy won't be effective.

Instead, you need to start researching resource pages that are related to your brand. Narrow down the ones within your niche.

You don't need any fancy software or subscriptions to do this. All you have to do is use Google.

For example, let's say your website is in the food industry. You could try the following search string to identify resource pages.
"Cooking" + inurl:links
Put your keyword in quotes to find pages related to that specific word, which is "cooking" in this instance. By adding "inurl:links" to the query, it limits the search to websites with the word "links" in the URL.

It's unlikely that people who have cooking websites will be discussing links. So you know that your search results will yield resource pages.

Generally, everything you see in these SERPs will be a list of links in some form or another. Now you just have to go through each site and select the ones you want to pursue.

Be selective. You don't need to reach out to every resource page on the planet.

When you're reviewing the search results, the number one thing to look for is page authority. Page authority is more important than domain authority in this case. That's because you're trying to get your link shared on a particular resource page.

So even if certain sites don't have the highest domain authority, you can still reach out to them if they have a resource page in your niche with a high page authority.

Contact the webmasters

Once you've found some resource pages with a high page authority that are relevant to your brand, it's time for you to reach out to those webmasters.

But before you do that, it's important to take the time to review the links that are already shared on each particular resource page. This will help you figure out what types of links you should be sending to the webmaster.

In my experience, it's usually rare for resource pages to link out to the homepages of other websites. When they do link to homepages, it's usually for bigger and more well-known brands.

So if you're just blindly submitting your homepage to resource pages, there is no guarantee that you'll be featured. Instead, you're better off sending them content pages.

Each webmaster is different, so just make sure you can pitch something that fits within the page you're requesting a link on. For example, let's say you found a cooking website that's mostly related to grilling and BBQ. You could pitch a blog post about a barbeque grilled chicken recipe.

If you don't have this type of content on your website, you should create it. Not only will it help you get featured on more niche resource pages for the purpose of building backlinks, but it's also valuable content for your website and SEO strategy.

Take a look at this example from Teri's Kitchen, which was one of the top hits of the Google search results we saw earlier.

Based on this, it's clear that the site accepts submissions. In fact, it almost seems like they encourage it.

So in this case, all you'd need to do is reach out. This is something that you'll see on most resource pages. They'll be some type of easy contact form or instructions asking for links.

Most resource pages want more links on their site. Remember, that's the whole purpose of a resource page.

So if you pitch them something relevant, it shouldn't be too difficult to get featured. It benefits both parties. You build backlinks while the resource page improves at the same time. The more resources these webmasters have on each page, the more valuable it is for their website.

Your pitch doesn't need to be too persuasive. Less is more. Just send the link with a couple of sentences about why you think it fits on their page.

Alternative search strings

Link building with resource pages is pretty straightforward. As I've described above, the whole process can essentially be broken down into two steps:

1. Find a relevant page

2. Contact the webmaster

By following the search string that we used earlier with "keyword" + inurl:links, it will bring you straight to resource pages.

But to get the most out of this strategy, you need to switch up your search queries to find other results. Depending on your search, you'll be able to identify different resource pages.

I'll take you through three of the best search options to improve the first step of this process.

Useful resources

Another one of my favorite search strings for finding resource pages is by adding "useful resources" in addition to the keyword in quotes. Here's what it looks like using our cooking example:
"Cooking" + useful resources
Right away, look at the number of results that this search yielded.

There are nearly 77 million hits. If you refer back to the "inurl" search we used earlier, there were just 244,000 results.

Obviously, you aren't going to be scrolling through thousands or millions of results. But the point I'm trying to make here is that this alternate search will bring up new results.

In my experience, searching for the keyword plus useful resources usually displays lots of authoritative websites.

Now you just have to follow the same process. Go through each of the top results one at a time. See what kind of content each resource page is sharing. Then determine what link on your site that you're going to pitch before you contact the webmaster.

In some cases, it can be a bit challenging to get featured on these authoritative sites. They may have a more exclusive selection process. But at the end of the day, they still exist for the same purpose of linking out to other websites, so don't sell yourself short.

Educational domains

Depending on the type of website you have, you might want to limit your resource page outreach to authoritative and trusted sites only.

For this purpose, I'd recommend using the following search string:
site: .edu "keyword" links
So continuing with our cooking example, the search would look like this:
site: .edu "cooking" links
Again, this query will bring up a completely new set of results.

Now, it's worth noting that not all of the results will necessarily be relevant to your site. You still have to go through and find the ones that are resource pages that are actually accepting submissions.

For the most part, you won't see sites with a .edu domain that have something like Teri's Kitchen, which we discussed earlier. Teri asks for submissions right at the top of the page. That won't be the case for Harvard's website.

So you'll need to work a little bit harder to get featured.

Authority sites with .edu domains usually have a big staff as well. It's not just one person monitoring the site and adding content. General submissions may not always be sent to the right person. So you need to figure out who is responsible for the particular page that you want to be featured on.

Here's a trick that I've used in the past.

Look to the URL of the page. That can give you a clue of who you should be getting in contact with. The URL might give away the particular department associated with that resource page. Then you can go through the staff listing and see who is the head of that department. Their contact information should be available there as well.

You can also use an employee directory or even LinkedIn to find the right person who manages that page or the webmaster for a particular department.

Here's another trick. Scroll to the very bottom of the page and it will sometimes show you a "last updated by" note with a person's name.

If you search around on the site and do some digging, you can usually find what you're looking for. Here's an example from the University of Nebraska - Lincoln, which was one of the top search results for our .edu query.

Here is the footer of the resource page.

As you can see, there is a separate email address for the food department.

You could even take this one step further by clicking the "food team resources" link just a few lines below that email address on the left side of the footer.

That would bring you to this page:

There's another link here showing the staff listing and their contact information.

It's better to take these extra steps now to increase the chances of getting your links featured. Otherwise, it's just going to be a waste of your time if you submit to the wrong person, department, or your submission gets ignored.

Sending emails to info@unviersityabc.edu won't get the job done. Your message will just get lost in the shuffle.

These websites have so many other things that are more important to deal with. So if your email is delivered to the wrong person, it's unlikely that they will forward it to the appropriate party.

Related to keyword

If you have a unique niche that doesn't have tons of resource pages, you'll need to find ways to broaden your search to get the best results.

Change the search string accordingly. Here is one of my favorite tricks to find more related sites.

Simply remove the quotes from your keyword. By removing the quotes, it tells Google that you're not looking for an exact match keyword. Years ago you used to have to add a tilde (~) to search for related terms, but now Google does this by default.

So go back and remove the quotes from your inurl, useful resources, and .edu searches to see what comes up.

Here's an example to show you the difference.

When we first searched for useful resources with quotes around cooking, we got just under 77 million results.

But now that we've removed the quotes, we're approaching 92 million hits.

Conclusion

Resource pages should be at the top of your priority list when it comes to your link building strategy.

Take advantage of all of the different search strings that I've explained above. This will give you the widest range of search results to find resource pages in different categories.

I'd recommend going through the top 50 hits or so within your niche for each query. Then narrow down the options that would be a good fit for your site.

Now find your best content that matches the specified resource page before you ask to be featured. Remember, it's more likely that your link will be shared if you pitch content as opposed to the general homepage.

Make sure you contact the right person. This will be more challenging for higher authority sites, especially with an .edu domain, but it's still doable if you dig around.

If you don't have content that fits these resource sites, you can always create new content before submitting.

Follow the process that I've outlined above to build quality links with resource pages.

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How to Build Quality Links From Resource Pages

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Every website needs to prioritize link building. Regardless of your business type or industry, backlinks help drive more traffic to your website and are great for SEO purposes. So where should you start? Resource pages need to be a major component of your link building strategy.

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Blogging - Affiliate Marketing - Email Marketing

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Blogging - Affiliate Marketing - Email Marketing

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The Definitive Guide To Online Marketing

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Welcome To Mark Lloyd's Epic Guide to Email Marketing, Affiliate marketing and Blogging. Learn to Increase brand awareness and increase conversion.

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Part 1 on getting a UX designer job series.

As a Product Designer, we spend 50% of our time making presentations, I am going to share a few tips I learned.

№1. Don't look silly

We think sharing our personality makes it look genuine, but sometimes it reduces your level. Once your reputation got damaged at the starting of the presentation, it is pretty hard to regain people attention.

No dumb jokes

Avoid using these words: So you know... basically... obviously... at the end of the day. I dont know.... Maybe.... Yeah Yeah... Kind off...

Sometimes people say → I worked as a cook 👩‍🍳. Make sure why it is necessary to tell in this context.

№2 Show Evidence

Brain Doubts a Foreign Accent - Scientific american

If you are a non-native English speaker it may be hard for you to communicate your idea clearly, this may cause people to doubt the accuracy. Here are some hints

✅ Don't just say I tested the concept show the Evidence of testing.

✅ Show more Doodles, field work, non-polished screen even it looks terrible it's okay. Those factors naturally make you an honest person.

🛑 Dont make random assumptions like "Kids love the color" - How do you know?

✅ Show statistics, from our field research "75% of kids are more inclined towards colored version"

🛑 Never say: They like this design, They said it's easy to use.

✅ Describe Who are they? Ex: Linda 35 years old working women from New York said: "she would use this feature".

✅ Show real Persona's picture: Describe very specific characters, Pain-point

🛑 Don't say I decided to make this screen list view.

✅ Say: We found from the survey/interview that, the list view is very easy for users to read.

№3. Present →Don't read

What is the Story your arehere to tell is important

Please. Please. Don't read the text in your slides.

Use more Visuals try to avoid text in the slide.

✅ Change your emotion and voice level

🛑 Don't just speak continuously without looking at the listeners.

✅ Try describing differently than the words used in the slides.

Tell your unique coherent story. Every single designer in the world is going to follow this format (Problem. Goal. Research. Solution. Metrics). Think different but be unified.

Knowing who is in the room of your portfolio presentation is super important because it will help you to tailor your presentation relevant to them.

№4. No fancy animated slides

"Though humans are sending satellites to Mars, we still can't fix the video conferencing😞 "
Most common issues,

1. There will be Network/Bandwidth Issues - Most of the time your animated gif won't work.

2. Audio Issues - Sounds clips never works. If you are lucky it may work, but in companies, people can't listen loudly.

3. Display color issue - Make sure your slides are legible to read from far and in poor displays - black and white slides are best.

№5. Show only Realistic/ Viable product

Think about the long-term survival of the product and its ability to money over a time

What would go wrong - State possible failure and breakage may happen.

Recommend some ideas to meditate.

Demonstrate the value - Ex: This app makes the booking process fast, cheap.

How you are going to measure it?

№6. Hints for Q/A section

Listen carefully.

Give a short and thoughtful response.

Answer in bulleted points.

For example, if the interviewer asks "why do you decide to have a Blue color"? Wrong way:
Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...

Correct way
1. User said Blah...Blah...Blah...Blah...
2. From interview Blah...Blah...Blah...
3. Blah...Blah...

№7. Health

10 min before the video call

Drink one glass water.

Watch the fun video right before the interview - Because having a positive face will make a big impact on your interview. 😇

Hope it helps! 🙌

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7 practical portfolio presentation tips for product designers

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As a Product Designer, we spend 50% of our time making presentations, I am going to share a few tips I learned. We think sharing our personality makes it look genuine, but sometimes it reduces your level. Once your reputation got damaged at the starting of the presentation, it is pretty hard to regain people attention.

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Welke muziek is geschikt om je te concentreren

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Welke muziek is geschikt om je te concentreren

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"What is the best music to listen to while working?"

It's one of those questions I get asked often, whether in the office or online. And since I enjoy producing audio and music in my spare time, and am constantly researching productivity topics in my role as a blogger for Wrike, I figured I should write this stuff down.

Obviously, the answer will depend on your audio preference. I can't force you to listen to downtempo electronica if you like film soundtracks, or if you prefer the ambient sounds of a restaurant. I can however provide you with some guidelines surrounding audio and work, backed by science.

Tips on Listening While You Work

1. Play Music When Doing Repetitive Tasks You've Mastered

A study done involving 50 surgeons found that listening to music improved their speed and accuracy as they accomplished repetitive tasks that they already knew how to do well. The best performance occurred in surgeons who chose their music. And even in the group where the experimenters chose the music, surgeons still did better than those with no music at all! So if you have 200 support tickets to power through, then by all means crank up that EDM playlist that you listen to at the gym.
2. Listen to Instrumental Music to Stay Focused
Stick with instrumental music when it's time to focus, since lyrics can be distracting. A study in Taiwan involving 102 workers concluded that background music with lyrics had significant negative effects on concentration and attention. So if you're ever tempted to play Europe's " The Final Countdown" on loudspeakers near the end of the sales cycle, just... don't. Everyone will sing along and it'll take about 25 minutes to get back to what you were doing.

3. Use Music in a Major Key to Lift Your Mood

Some research suggests that it isn't the physical sound wave hitting your eardrum that makes the difference, it's the way the audio makes you feel. In fact, a study on how background music can affect anxiety, satisfaction with communication, and productivity revealed that listeners exposed to music in a major key were not only more productive but also more satisfied in their communication with others as compared to those who listened to music in minor keys or dissonant tones. So if you're a Mozart diehard, then by all means, loop the Piano Sonata No.11 in A Major to help you write next week's blog posts with a smile.
4. Find Music with a Fixed Tempo and Volume
Fixed tempo means it goes at a steady pace, never speeding up or slowing down. And a fixed volume means there are no loud surprises after a soft section. It also means you set the volume level and leave it there the entire time.

If you like jazz, avant garde blues might not be as productive as, say, ragtime or bebop. If you like electronic music, house music's steady 4/4 rhythms are spot-on. If you like classical music in general, veer away from the intense ups and downs of Wagner and (some) Beethoven and instead, stick to the steady rhythms of Mozart or Baroque-era music (Bach and Vivaldi). In fact, a study involving radiologists and Baroque classical music shows improved diagnostic efficiency and accuracy when listening to Bach.

In my personal experience, ever since high school, I've studied for exams using nothing but Stan Getz/Joao Gilberto bossa nova, and Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. In fact, I credit its steadiness with helping me memorize and recall details - so much so that I could often hear the music in my head as I answered test questions.
5. Listen to Ambient Noise at Low Volumes for Creative Tasks
If your work involves thinking up ideas or you're building a product from scratch, try listening to ambient noise (such as coffee house sounds or white/pink/brown noise generators).

Research shows that listening to ambient noise at a moderate level (around 70 decibels) enhances performance on creative tasks. The logic here is that a low stream of of noise stays in the background, not vying for attention, but its presence forces your brain to process more stimuli, which promotes abstract reasoning and enhances creativity. But once it gets louder (around 85 decibels), the noise then reduces our capability to process information, which in turn cripples creativity.
6. Use Noise-Canceling Headphones
Most noise-canceling headphones have a built-in microphone that actively listens to the ambient noise around you (traffic, airplane rumble, etc.) then generates a noise-canceling wave that is out of phase with the ambient sound, effectively negating each other. So even if you opt to forgo the audio, the headphones can at least cancel out most of the distracting sounds around you.

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Sound Advice: What to Listen to While Working

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"What is the best music to listen to while working?" It's one of those questions I get asked often, whether in the office or online. And since I enjoy producing audio and music in my spare time, and am constantly researching productivity topics in my role as a blogger for Wrike, I figured I should write this stuff down.

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Tips and tricks, materials checklists, examples of slides.

What do you imagine when you hear "brainstorming"? Maybe a crowd of people who you used to call colleagues, outshouting each other, assaulting the whiteboard, and nearly throwing punches to win control over the projector? Fortunately, brainstorming has a bright side: a civilized process of generating ideas together. At least this is how it appears in the books on creativity. So, can we make it real? I have already tried the three methodologies presented in this article with friends of mine:

After reaching the end of this article, I hope that you'll be able to organize brainstorming sessions with your colleagues and clients, and co-create something valuable. For instance, ideas about a new mobile application or a design conference agenda.

Don't be surprised to notice all brainstorming techniques have much in common. Although "rituals" vary, the essence is the same. Participants look at the subject from different sides and come up with ideas. They write their thoughts down and then make sorting or prioritizing. I know, sounds easy as pie, doesn't it? But here's the thing. Without the rules of the game, brainstorming won't work. It all boils down to just three crucial principles.

1. The more, the better. Brainstorming aims at the quantity, which later turns into quality. The more ideas a team generates the wider choice it gains. It's normal when two or more participants say the same thing. It's normal if some ideas are funny. A facilitator's task is encouraging people to share what is hidden in their mind.

2. No criticism. The goal of brainstorming is to generate a pool of ideas. All ideas are welcome. A boss has no right to silence a subordinate. An analyst shouldn't make fun of a colleague's "fantastic" vision. A designer shouldn't challenge the usability of a teammates' suggestion.

3. Follow the plan. Only a goal-oriented and time-bound activity is productive, whereas uncontrolled bursts of creativity, as a rule, fail. To make a miracle happen, organize the best conditions for it.

Here are the slides you can use as an introduction to brainstorming.

Now when the principles are clear, you are to decide who's going to participate. Invite as many different experts as possible including business owners, analysts, marketers, developers, salespeople, potential or real users. All participants should be related to the subject or be interested in it. Otherwise, they'll fantasize about the topic they've never dealt with.

Technique 1. Six Thinking Hats

This method was invented in 1985 by Edward de Bono, a Maltese physician, psychologist, and consultant.

Overview

Complexity: normal.

Subject: a process, a service, a product, a feature, anything. For example, one of the topics at our session was the improvement of the designers' office infrastructure. Another team brainstormed about how to improve the functionality of the Sketch app.

Duration: 1-1.5 hours.

Facilitation: 1 facilitator for a group of 5-8 members. If there are more people, better divide them into smaller groups and involve assistants. We split our design crew of over 20 people into three workgroups, which were working simultaneously on their topics.

Materials

Slides with step-by-step instructions.

A standalone timer or laptop with an online timer in the fullscreen mode.

6 colored paper hats or any recognizable hat symbols for each participant. The colors are blue, yellow, green, white, red, and black. For example, we used crowns instead of hats, and it was fun.

Sticky notes of 6 colors: blue, yellow, green, white, red, and brown or any other dark tint for representing black. 1-2 packs of each color per team of 5-8 people would be enough.

A whiteboard or a flip-chart or a large sheet of paper on a table or wall.

Black marker pens for each participant (markers should be whiteboard-safe if you choose this kind of surface).

Process

Start a brainstorming session with a five-minute intro. What will participants do? Why is it important? What will the outcome be? What's next? It's time to explain the steps. In my case, we described the whole process beforehand to ensure people get the concept of "thinking hats." De Bono's "hat" represents a certain way of perceiving reality. Different people are used to "wearing" one favorite "hat" most of the time, which limits creativity and breeds stereotypes. For example, risk analysts are used to finding weaknesses and threats. That's why such a phenomenon as gut feeling usually doesn't ring them a bell.

Trying on "hats" is a metaphor that helps people to start thinking differently with ease. Below is an example of the slides that explain what each "hat" means. Our goal was to make people feel prepared, relaxed, and not afraid of the procedure complexity.

The blue "hat" is an odd one out. It has an auxiliary role and embodies the process of brainstorming itself. It starts the session and finishes it. White, yellow, black, red, and green "hats" represent different ways to interpret reality. For example, the red one symbolizes intuitive and emotional perception. When the black "hat" is on, participants wake up their inner "project manager" and look at the subject through the concepts of budgets, schedule, cost, and revenue.

There are various schemas of "hats" depending on the goal. We wanted to try all the "hats" and chose a universal, all-purpose order:

1. Blue - preparation.

2. White - collecting available and missing data.

3. Red - listening to emotions and unproven thoughts.

4. Yellow - noticing what is good right now.

5. Green - thinking about improvements and innovations.

6. Black - analyzing risks and resources.

7. Blue - summarizing.

Now the exercise itself. Each slide is a cheat sheet with a task and prompts. When a new step starts and a proper slide appears on the screen, a facilitator starts the timer. Some steps have an extended duration; other steps require less time. For instance, it's easy to agree on a topic formulation and draw a canvas but writing down ideas is a more time-consuming activity.

When participants see a "hat" slide (except the blue one), they are to generate ideas, write them on sticky notes and put the notes on the whiteboard, flip-chart or paper sheet. For example, the yellow "hat" is displayed on the screen. People put on yellow paper hats and think about the benefits and nice features the subject has now and why it may be useful or attractive. They concisely write these thoughts on the sticky notes of a corresponding color (for the black "hat" - any dark color can be used so that you don't need to buy special white markers). All the sticky notes of the same color should be put in the corresponding column of the canvas.

The last step doesn't follow the original technique. We thought it would be pointless to stick dozens of colored notes and call it a day. We added the Affinity sorting part aimed at summarizing ideas and making the moment of their implementation a bit closer. The teams had to find notes about similar things, group them into clusters and give a name to each cluster. For example, in the topic "Improvement of the designers' office infrastructure," my colleagues created such clusters as "Chair ergonomics," "Floor and walls," "Hardware upgrade."

We finished the session with the mini-presentations of findings. A representative from each team listed the clusters they came up with and shared the most exciting observation or impression.

Technique 2. Walt Disney's Creative Strategy

Walt Disney's creative method was discovered and modeled by Robert Dilts, a neuro-linguistic programming expert, in 1994.

Overview

Complexity: easy.

Subject: anything, especially projects you've been postponing for a long time or dreams you cannot start fulfilling for unknown reasons. For example, one of the topics I dealt with was "Improvement of the designer-client communication process."

Duration: 1 hour.

Facilitation: 1 facilitator for a group of 5-8 members. When we conducted an educational workshop on brainstorming, my co-trainers and I had four teams of six members working simultaneously in the room.

Materials

Slides with step-by-step instructions.

A standalone timer or laptop with an online timer in the fullscreen mode.

Standard or large yellow sticky notes (1-2 packs per team of 5-8 people).

Small red sticky notes (1-2 packs per team).

The tiniest sticky stripes or sticky dots for voting (1 pack per team).

A whiteboard or a flip-chart or a large sheet of paper on a table or wall.

Black marker pens for each participant (markers should be whiteboard-safe if you choose this kind of surface).

Process

This technique is called after the original thinking manner of Walt Disney, a famous animator and film producer. Disney didn't use any "technique"; his creative process was intuitive yet productive. Robert Dilts, a neuro-linguistic programming expert, discovered this creative knowhow much later based on the memories of Disney's colleagues. Although original Dilts's concept is designed for personal use, we managed to turn it into a group format.

Disney's strategy works owing to the strict separation of three roles - the dreamer, the realist, and the critic. People are used to mixing these roles while thinking about the future, and that's why they often fail. "Let's do X. But it's so expensive. And risky... Maybe later," this is how an average person dreams. As a result, innovative ideas get buried in doubts and fears.

In this kind of brainstorming, the facilitator's goal is to prevent participants from mixing the roles and nipping creative ideas in the bud. We helped the team to get into the mood and extract pure roles through open questions on the slides and introductory explanations.

For example, here is my intro to the first role. "The dreamer is not restrained by limitations or rules of the real world. The dreamer generates as many ideas as possible and doesn't think about the obstacles on the way of their implementation. He or she imagines the most fun, easy, simple, and pleasant ways of solving a problem. The dreamer is unaware of criticism, planning, and rationalism altogether." As a result, participants should have a bunch of encircled ideas.

When participants come up with the cloud of ideas, they proceed to the next step. It's important to explain to them what the second role means. I started with the following words, "The realist is the dreamer's best friend. The realist is the manager who can convert a vague idea into a step-by-step plan and find necessary resources. The realist has no idea about criticism. He or she tries to find some real-world implementation for dreamer's ideas, namely who, when, and how can make an idea true."

Brainstormers write down possible solutions on sticky notes and put them on the corresponding idea circles. Of course, some of the ideas can have no solution, whereas others may be achieved in many ways.

The third role is the trickiest one because people tend to think this is the guy who drags dreamer's and realist's work through the mud. Fortunately, this is not true. "The critic is the dreamer's and realist's best friend," I started my explanation, "This person analyses risks and cares about the safety of proposed solutions. The critic doesn't touch bare ideas but works with solutions only. The critic's goal is to help and foresee potential issues in advance." The team defines risks and writes them down on smaller red notes. A solution can have no risks or several risks.

After that team members start voting for the ideas they consider worth further work. They make a decision based on the value of an idea, the availability of solutions, and the severity of connected risks. Ideas without solutions couldn't be voted for since they had no connection with reality. During my workshops, each participant had 3 voting dots. They could distribute them in different ways, for instance, stick the dots to three different ideas or support one favorite idea with all the dots.

The final activity is roadmapping. The team takes the ideas that gained the most support (typically, 6-10) and arrange them on a timeline depending on the implementation effort. If an idea is easy to put into practice, it goes to the column "Now." If an idea is complex and requires a lot of preparation or favorable conditions, it's farther on the timeline.

Of course, there should be time for sharing the main findings. Teams present their timelines with shortlisted ideas and tell about the tendencies they have observed during the exercise.

Technique 3. SCAMPER

This technique was proposed in 1953 by Alex Osborn, best known for co-founding and leading BBDO, a worldwide advertising agency network.

Overview

Complexity: normal to hard.

Subject: ideally, technical or tangible things, although the author and evangelists of this method say it's applicable for anything. From my experience, SCAMPER works less effective with abstract objects. For example, the team barely coped with the topic "Improve communication between a designer and client," but it worked great for "Invent the best application for digital prototyping."

Duration: up to 2 hours.

Facilitation: 1 facilitator for a group of 5-8 members.

Materials

Slides with step-by-step instructions.

A standalone timer or laptop with an online timer in the fullscreen mode.

Standard yellow sticky notes (7 packs per team of 5-8 people).

A whiteboard or a flip-chart or a large sheet of paper on a table or wall.

Black marker pens for each participant (markers should be whiteboard-safe if you choose this kind of surface).

Optionally: Thinkpak cards by Michael Michalko (1 pack per team).

Process

This brainstorming method employs various ways to modify an object. It's aimed at activating the inventory thinking and helps to optimize an existing product or create a brand new thing.

Each letter in the acronym represents a certain transformation you can apply to the subject of brainstorming.

S - Substitute.

C - Combine.

A - Adapt.

M - Modify.

P - Put to other uses.

E - Eliminate.

R - Rearrange or reverse.

It's necessary to illustrate each step with an example and ask participants to generate a couple of ideas themselves for the sake of training. As a result, you'll be sure they won't get stuck. We explained the mechanism by giving sample ideas for improving such an ordinary object as a ballpoint pen.

Substitute the ink with something edible.

Combine the body and the grip so that they are one piece.

Adapt a knife for "writing" on wood like a pen.

Modify the body so that it becomes flexible - for wearing as a bracelet.

Use a pen as a hairpin or arrow for darts.

Eliminate the clip and use a magnet instead.

Reverse the clip. As a result, the nib will be oriented up, and the pen won't spill in a pocket.

After the audience doesn't have questions left, you can start. First of all, team members agree on the subject formulation. Then they draw a canvas on a whiteboard or large paper sheet.

Once a team sees one of the SCAMPER letters on the screen, they start generating ideas using the corresponding method: substitute, combine, adapt, modify, and so on. They write the ideas down and stick the notes into corresponding canvas columns. Questions on the slides remind what each step means and help to get in a creative mood. Time limitation helps to concentrate and not to dive into discussions.

Affinity sorting - the last step - is our designers' contribution to the original technique. It pushes the team to start implementation. Otherwise, people quickly forget all valuable findings and return to the usual state of things. Just imagine how discouraging it will be if the results of a two-hour ideation session are put on the back burner.

Thinkpak cards

It's a set of brainstorming cards created by Michael Michalko. Thinkpak makes a session more exciting through gamification. Each card represents a certain letter from SCAMPER. Participants shuffle the pack, take cards in turn and come up with corresponding ideas about an object. It's fun to compete in the number of ideas each participant generates for a given card within a limited time, for instance, three or five minutes.

My mates and I have tried brainstorming with Thinkpak and without it, and it works both ways. Cards are great for training inventory thinking. If your team has never participated in brainstorming sessions, it'll be great to play the cards first and then switch to a business subject.

Lessons learned

Dry run. People often become disappointed in brainstorming if the first session they participate in fails. Some people I worked with have a prejudice towards creativity and consider it the waste of time or something not proven scientifically. Fortunately, we tried all the techniques internally - in the design team. As a result, all the actual brainstorming sessions went well. Moreover, our confidence helped others to believe in the power of brainstorming exercises.

Relevant topic and audience. Brainstorming can fail if you invite people who don't have a relevant background or the power and willing to change anything. Once I asked a team of design juniors to ideate about improving the process of selling design services to clients. They lacked the experience and couldn't generate plenty of ideas. Fortunately, it was a training session, and we easily changed the topic.

Documenting outcomes. So, the session is over. Participants go home or return to their workplaces. Almost surely the next morning they will recall not a single thing. I recommend creating a wrap-up document with photos and digitized canvases. The quicker you write and share it, the higher the chance of ideas implementation is.

Further reading

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How to brainstorm right: a guide for designers

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What do you imagine when you hear "brainstorming"? Maybe a crowd of people who you used to call colleagues, outshouting each other, assaulting the whiteboard, and nearly throwing punches to win control over the projector? Fortunately, brainstorming has a bright side: a civilized process of generating ideas together.

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User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) may seem interchangeable, but these features can make or break your company's website. You need excellent UX and UI to achieve your design goals, increase web traffic, and retain customers on your page.

However, many businesses are unintentionally making irreparable mistakes when it comes to these design features - and their sales are suffering as a result.

Here are 7 common mistakes you may be making that are most certainly costing your business some highly coveted engagement.

What Is User Interface?

UI design refers to how users engage with a website and how easily they can navigate from page to page.

A UI designer makes your company website intuitive, responsive and easy to use for your site visitors. If your website is difficult to navigate, your customers will leave and find a site with a better interface. Usually, UI designers work on areas of the website where your customers will visit and look at your products.

Some of a UI designer's job functions include:

Customer analysis

Brand personality development

Prototyping and testing

Screen resolution analysis and adaptation

Interactivity and animation

Design research

Implementation and developer consultation

Meetings with UX designers

What Is User Experience?

UX design refers to the features of a website that attract and retain visitors and potential customers. Unlike the name may imply, a UX designer's job is not to create design elements of a web page. They do not handle colors, graphics or images. People involved in UX make sure that a website is seamless, functional and easy to use for people visiting your website.

UX designers determine who the target clients are and implement web design strategies to make your website as easy and enjoyable to use for that demographic as possible. UX designers value functionality, adaptability and usability.

Some of a UX designer's job functions include:

Web development planning

Coordination with developers and UI designers

Analysis of web traffic and iteration of certain features

Prototyping new features

Competitor and customer analysis

Content development

Goal tracking and testing

Product structure and strategy

It is very easy to make mistakes with UX and UI. Hiring a professional who is skilled in these areas can help your company target these issues and remedy them for the best possible customer experience.

Mistake #1: Too Few (or Nonexistent) CTAs

Your Calls-to-Action (CTAs) are arguably one of the most important parts of your website. You basically throw all your potential sales conversion power behind one message that tells your visitors to "Click Here" or "Buy Now."

CTAs are crucial to obtaining new leads and sales, and should contain the following elements:

An effective, simple button design

A bright color that contrasts with the rest of the web page

A moderate size: not so small that customers don't notice it and not so big that it seems intimidating

A clickable shape, usually rectangular and not surrounded by text or images

Active, compelling language that conveys a sense of urgency; uses active words, a time-related word, and first-person point-of-view

An intuitive location after the initial proposal convincing the customer to convert, logically urging the user to "Sign Up" or "Learn More"

A short message, ideally fewer than 60 characters

Dive Deeper: How To Create CTAs that Actually Cause Action
Mistake #2: Too Many Pop-Ups

Pop-up windows are popular among marketers for a number of reasons. They help push conversion rates and encourage consumers to sign up for a newsletter or check out a new offer. However, pop-ups could land you in hot water in the search engine rankings. Google announced in August 2016 that they would penalize websites with pop-ups that appeared immediately or that covered the main content:

Pop-ups can annoy customers and make your content less accessible, so use them responsibly. Google will not penalize pop-ups that contain cookie agreements, age verification, or only use a small portion of the screen. Make sure your pop-ups are necessary and are not too large.
Dive Deeper: How Correctly Used Pop-Ups Can Help Increase Leads
Mistake #3: Little to No Social Presence

In search engine rankings, your company's social presence is becoming increasingly important. Including customer feedback, testimonials, and links to your social media feed can boost your search engine optimization and lead to higher conversion rates among your website visitors.

Without a social presence, your company loses credibility. Your consumers want to see what other people are saying about your products to make a purchasing decision. Without this information, customers are more inclined to purchase from a competitor with a more active presence. Add links to your social profiles, user-generated content, testimonials, and other social information to increase your presence.

Mistake #4: Your Design Is Not Mobile-Responsive

Nearly everyone has a smartphone with Internet capabilities nowadays. As a result, more people than ever search for products and services on their phones rather than their laptops. In fact, 3.7 billion people across the world use mobile devices for online surfing - which amounts to about 52% of all web traffic:

If your website does not work for mobile devices, these potential customers will leave your site and visit a mobile-friendly competitor.

In addition, Google ranks websites based on user behavior and mobile-friendliness. If many users leave your page after opening it, the search engine will rank you lower in the results. To avoid losing crucial mobile users, make sure your website is responsive to both mobile devices and traditional desktop computer screens. A UI designer can help you adapt your website to various screen sizes for the benefit of your business.
Dive Deeper: 12 Quick Fixes to Make Your Mobile Traffic Convert
Mistake #5: You Use Long-Form Copy

Website users want information that is quick to read and easy to skim, gaining necessary information without having to read through massive blocks of text. Long-form copy may be necessary for some businesses, such as insurance companies or law firms, but for other companies it can hurt you.

Unless you need to write an in-depth post, stick to short-form copy. If you do choose to write longer posts, you can make it much easier to read by breaking up large blocks of text with bold, descriptive headers and subheaders, turning long lists into bullet points, and sectioning your post with relevant images that enhance or explain the text. At the end of the day, it generally comes down to your goals:

Mistake #6: Hard-to-Read Fonts and Poor Color Contrast

This is a common and completely avoidable issue on websites. If users cannot read your website easily, they will leave and find a better, more legible competitor. Make sure that you do not use thin fonts that are difficult to read, such as script fonts or fonts with a lot of flair. Stick to crisp, clear fonts such as Calibri, Arial, Times New Roman, Helvetica, etc.

Consider the below images: the image on the top is an example of a poor font to use, while the image on the bottom is an example of a clear, crisp font:

For color contrast, make sure you place dark text on light backgrounds - placing light text on a light background, for example, will make your website extremely difficult to navigate. In addition, placing white text on a black background can also be difficult to read for many users. For best results, stick to a light background/dark text contrast (like this!).

Mistake #7: Poor Images and Graphics

Customers expect a certain quality of website nowadays. If you use cheesy, staged stock photos or poor-quality images, you can turn customers off to your web page. Make sure you use photos in effective ways that enhance the content.

Choose images that are high resolution and have low pixelation. Images that are pixelated or out of focus are big mistakes. Make sure your images are crisp, clear and appropriate for your web page. For example, look at the quality between these two identical pictures:

The apple image on the left has a lower resolution of 200px, and compared to the apple on the right, the difference in quality is obvious. The apple on the right has a high resolution of 2,000px, and has a crisp, clean image with low pixilation. The colors look brighter and the lines are sharper with the high-resolution apple, and in contrast, the low-resolution apple looks dull and unprofessional. Which image would you rather have on your website?

Poor UX design can drive customers away from your website and decrease lead generation. By following these tips, you can keep your site away from these common mistakes and get the edge on your competitors.

In Conclusion

The User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) of your website can make or break your company's site. Make sure you spend the time and resources to provide excellent UX and UI to ensure that you retain customers on your page.

Remember, UI design refers to how users engage with a website and how easily they can navigate from page to page. UX design refers to the features of a website that attract and retain visitors and potential customers.

Fix these 7 common mistakes you may be making and watch your engagement increase!

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7 Mistakes in UI and UX That Are Costing You Engagement - Single Grain

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User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) may seem interchangeable, but these features can make or break your company's website. You need excellent UX and UI to achieve your design goals, increase web traffic, and retain customers on your page.

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In this experiment, a section dedicated to choosing gift messages was taken out and separated into its own individial step. The change happened on the first step of a checkout flow and increased the flow by an additional step. Impact on checkouts and total sales was measured.

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Reach higher conversions faster by repeating what worked for others and avoiding what failed.

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If video marketing is the future, then the future is here. You're at the right place if you've been wondering whether it's worth putting your mind and money into video marketing. Do you have enough resources to create videos? Are enough people in your target audience interested in videos? And in the end, will it be worth the effort? In short: yes.

In this article, we will cover some of the key video marketing statistics that will help prove to you that the right time for video marketing is now. Use these quick and easy video marketing statistics to help guide your video marketing strategy for 2019.

Now let's get to the data on video marketing and what it has to say. We've compiled the latest statistics to make sure that your video marketing strategy for 2019, is on point.

1. Internet Users Everywhere Enjoy Video Content

More and more video content is being watched now than ever before. of all internet users in the United States watched online video content monthly on any of their devices (Statista, 2018). 25-34 year olds watched the most online videos, with adult males spending 40% more time watching videos on the internet than females. The time spent by users in the United States watching video content weekly on a smartphone is also seen to be growing over time. Interestingly, Saudi Arabia and Turkey ranked in first place, with 95% of all their internet users watching online video content on any device during any given month.

2. Demand for Video Content is Increasing

With the increasing demand for video, many industry influencers can be seen to be proactively producing different types of video content in order to meet this rising need. The respondents of this survey claimed that video content is in higher demand particularly because people are more likely to pay attention to it. There is a higher tendency to skip parts of audio and written content. For brands to get more of the audience's attention video is a good way to go.

3. Video as a Powerful Marketing Tool

4. Consumers Love Seeing Videos on Social Media

Users are seeing videos increasingly on every platform. Whether it's on blogs, Instagram ads or simply YouTube, they are expecting more video content. Videos are a consumers' favorite type of content to see from a brand on social media (Animoto, 2018). Based on the 2018 State of Social Video Marketer Trends report, of consumers claim that they have been influenced by a brand's social media presence when making a purchasing decision. This statistic alone shows how videos are getting popular with the passage of time. With video becoming a great influence on consumer decisions, it comes as no surprise that Instagram is on track to become the fastest-growing platform which uses video content to drive purchases.

5. Video Marketing = Profit

It all comes down to the return on investment ( ROI). If we look at the numbers, of video marketers are satisfied with the ROI of their video marketing efforts on social media (Animoto, 2018). The same report shows us that of marketers also claim to be satisfied by the ROI of video ads that they have posted to social media.

Broadly speaking companies use video marketing to increase their sales, build brand awareness as well as trust, to keep their current customers informed, and to reach out to potential customers. The platforms most commonly used by marketers for posting social media marketing videos and video ads are Instagram, , and Facebook. A reason why video marketing is favored as a marketing tool is because of its potential to explain everything in a format that is preferred by users - the visual format. Tutorials or explainer videos are especially popular among end users.

6. Video Marketing as a Lead Generation Channel

According to Optinmonster, video marketers get more qualified leads per year (Optinmonster, 2019). Optinmonster also concluded that video marketers achieve a increase in brand awareness . Additionally, of marketers say they've landed a new customer thanks to a video on social media. This increased quality of leads can be attributed to the quality of education that video brings. Not only do customers gain trust in companies, but they're also able to educate themselves about the company or their product through interactive visuals. These stats show that there's no need to second-guess the benefits of video marketing for business. As for video marketing in 2019, it will be a great way to grow your network and customer base, not just now, but also in the future.

7. Videos Engage Users For Longer on Your Website

Videos help keep users on your website longer and also keep them more engaged. The average user spends more time on a website with video (Forbes, 2018).

That fact alone is enough to prove how much more engaging video content is to most demographics. This could also have something to do with the fact that viewers retain messages better when they view it in a video, compared to written form. If you want people to stay on your website, get their attention by adding useful video content. Try creating product videos, demos, and how-to explainers for your audience. These are the most common videos produced by B2C companies. The most common distribution channels of this content websites and social media.

8. Education Through Video

Having mentioned the past few facts, it's no surprise that people would pick videos to learn about something that they're interested in. So, the next time you want to explain something to your customers, why not make a video about it?

The interesting part is that you don't even need a massive budget or external resources to help you create videos. Smaller companies aren't far behind when it comes to video production. A noteworthy example is the success story of the Dollar Shave Club , that grew from a viral video into a billion dollar brand. Which just goes to show that you don't need a whole cast and crew for your video marketing to start today.

In the United States, YouTube ranks first as market leader among video and entertainment websites , leaving behind big names such as Netflix and Hulu. YouTube is by far the most widely-adopted video channel for marketers (Wyzowl, 2018).

People enjoy watching a wide variety of videos on YouTube. These include tutorials, lifestyle videos, documentaries, podcasts, and a compilation of cat videos. Understanding what your customers watch on YouTube can help you create the most engaging content for them.

10. Video is more Captivating than Text

That's a wrap for the video marketing statistics 2019. We're hoping this has helped shed some light on how video marketing can be useful for you too! If you have any thoughts, let us know in the comment section below!

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10 Video Marketing Statistics for 2019 [Infographic]

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If video marketing is the future, then the future is here. These top 10 video marketing statistics for 2019 will help you stay at the top of your game. We're hoping that these quick and easy video marketing stats help you figure out your video marketing strategy for 2019!

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8 free technical SEO tools you probably haven’t heard of

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8 free technical SEO tools you probably haven’t heard of

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There are a plethora of technical SEO tool lists and articles out there, with some free and freemium tools to full-on paid tool lists.
This list pulls together eight of the more unheard-of tools to help you on your quest to improve the technical state of your site (for free).

With all the factors there are to consider when it comes to technical SEO, these tools can help you with bigger and some small elements.

You don't have to be a developer to use them as they are all fairly user-friendly and can save you time having to bother a developer as well.

Let's get started and make these tools less unheard-of!

Making sure that the pagination across a website is vital to allow search engines to see all the pages in a series.

Pagination being implemented incorrectly is one of the biggest problems especially when it comes to ecommerce sites as well as sites with news and blog sections.

Simply put the URL in you want to check the pagination on and click run, it quickly tells you if the (rel="prev/next") tags have been implemented correctly.

Probably the best go-to tool when your organic traffic has dramatically dropped off, or you are no longer seeing your site in the SERPs anymore.

You can quickly find out if your site has been affected by a Google algorithm change as well as any historical algorithm changes which may have affected the site.

This tools also links up to Google Analytics to gain the further insight needed.

The JSON-LD generator takes the pain out of having to write the schema code yourself, as you just choose the variables you need to tag up and it gives you the code.

This speeds up the process of putting structured data on your site.

This is awesome for bulk checking URL status codes and redirect paths, it also allows you to export the data to a CSV file.

It is great for website migrations as well a just quick page checks and has a really clean and easy to use interface.

On the subject or redirect paths, this wonderful free chrome plugin from Ayima shows really quickly the path and the status of the page you are on.

It will end up being one of the plugins you check whenever you land on a page, and will highlight problems you were otherwise unaware of on some pages.

Creating Hreflang tags and making sure they are correct can be one of the most daunting things to do when it comes to technical and international SEO.

This handy tool created by Aleyda Solis takes most of the worry away. All you have to do is simply upload the URLs you want to tag or alternatively upload them through a CSV file.

If you have created your own hreflang tags or want to check some existing ones that are on a site then this tool is amazing to give you the sanity check you need.

It's worth doing a check on this tool even if you're sure on the code, just to save a big headache it can cause if the tags are wrong later down the line.

I know you may be a bit skeptical about using a tool created by Google to get higher up the rankings, but they're trying to meet the users requests better. By using the tool you give them the data they need.

The structured data tool makes it easy to mark up the elements you want to tell Google about on your site and get them all marked up correctly.

Conclusion

As the technical elements and the code of websites progress and search engines try to become clever. Making sure that you make the search engines life as easy possible to be able to crawl your site is key to good and relevant rankings.

Hopefully, you hadn't heard of at least one of these free tools otherwise this all seems a little time wasting, for that I apologise :). On the other hand, if you hadn't heard of any then great this should make your technical SEO life easier and cheaper.

I do urge you to explore and see what free tools you can find out there to check the health of your site with. As they can save you money as well as show you problems you didn't even know existed.
Mark Osborne is SEO Manager at Blue Array.
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8 free technical SEO tools you probably haven't heard of - Search Engine Watch

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There are a plethora of technical SEO tool lists and articles out there, with some free and freemium tools to full-on paid tool lists. This list pulls together eight of the more unheard-of tools to help you on your quest to improve the technical state of your site (for free).

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BIGLIST of 50 Top Marketing Blogs for 2019 – Martech Edition

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BIGLIST of 50 Top Marketing Blogs for 2019 – Martech Edition

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During my marketing conference travels I was asked a curious question: Are blogs still a thing in marketing?

In my B2B marketing world, blogs are core to successful content, search, social and influencer marketing. It seems the business world agrees. The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth ongoing study of blogging and social media reported in 2018 that 53% of Fortune 500 companies have a corporate blog (an 11% increase over 2017) and 55% of the Inc 500 companies are blogging,

Blogs are still an effective part of marketing however it can also be argued that many of them are not well maintained or updated very often. But here's the thing: There's more useful knowledge about marketing being shared than ever before, so where can marketers find the best marketing blogs to follow?

With an origin story going back in 2007, our very own BIGLIST of marketing blogs has been awakened to BIGLIST 2.0.

To kick off the all new BIGLIST 2.0, I'll start with this list of 50 marketing blogs, sourced specifically from marketing technology and advertising solutions brands. Amongst this mix of blogs, marketing topics are pretty well represented ranging from overall digital marketing to SEO, content, social, advertising, email, mobile, video, influencer marketing and lead generation.

The identification and sorting of this list was accomplished using a combination of tools ( GroupHigh, BuzzSumo), human powered research (thanks Mike Odden!) and manual review of each blog.

Since many people are more prone to following content on the social web, I've also included the Twitter handle for each blog and you can see them all on a marketing blog Twitter list here.

Hopefully this list is useful for tapping into the marketing wisdom of these top marketing technology and advertising platforms. Be sure to stay tuned as we continue adding to the BIGLIST of marketing blogs with another niche list in the coming months.
Disclosure: LinkedIn, Oracle, GroupHigh and DivvyHQ are a few of the many marketing industry clients served by TopRank Marketing.

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BIGLIST of 50 Top Marketing Blogs for 2019 - Martech Edition

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During my marketing conference travels I was asked a curious question: Are blogs still a thing in marketing? In my B2B marketing world, blogs are core to successful content, search, social and influencer marketing. It seems the business world agrees.

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"...they force us to keep people at the center of the idea, preventing us from getting lost in mechanical or aesthetic details. They remind us at every moment that we are not dealing with things but with what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "transactions between people and things."

"Changing the world" has become a bit of a cliché in a Silicon Valley. Well IDEO is one of those companies that really get their hands dirty and actually do just that.

I only read Change by Design recently and I really wish it was the first book I've ever read on design. Tim Brown opens with defining what design thinking really is, what challenges designers usually work against and gives a lot of case studies to awe and inspire.

The book is actually split into two parts, the first being the theoretical background on how design thinkers work to solve problems, the second part is basically what should they work for.

It briefly touches on environmentalism, social responsibility, service thinking and many other subjects. It nails most points it's trying to make and at least for me, it was full of "I can't believe IDEO designed that" moments. Really worthy read if you are a seasoned designer too, looking to rekindle your passion for world-changing design.

Book summary:
Excellent book by a visionary designer that helps you understand what is design thinking, what kind of company is IDEO, why does it do so much work in Africa and South America and that ultimately, we should be designing for the people, for life, and for the planet.

"As you navigate through the rest of your life, be open to collaboration. Other people and other people's ideas are often better than your own. Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life."

This actually was a first book I ever read on design. Of course, I had to read it two times before most of its concepts started to make any sense to me. Jeff Gothelf obviously wanted to create a manual for designers switching to Lean startup or the agile environment. I think he succeeded.

Jeff managed to build on 3 main principles, design thinking (using design approach to innovate business and solutions for people), agile software methods (collaborating with coworkers on working software over documentation silos and quickly responding to change) and lean methodology (build, measure and learn cycle focused on getting rid of waste and optimizing process).

Book summary:
Great book if you need a crash course on Lean, agile or startup environment and want to see how abstract concepts of design thinking actually apply to working in a company. It will teach you how to set up your priorities, how to facilitate for your teams and how to introduce validation cycles into your sprints.

"It's a beautiful way to put it: Leave the poetry in what you make. When something becomes too polished, it loses its soul. It seems robotic."

The first time I read this book, I was on a flight from Sicily to Prague and I finished it before we landed. It's that short. At the same time though, it's packed with valuable insights into how to build a culture in your company, how is 37Signals, the company that created Basecamp different from other companies and how to prevent yourself from burning out.

The book focuses a lot on productivity and process in a sharp, concise way and every single chapter is absolutely spot on, complemented with really cool illustrations. If you spend any time working in an agency or software business, I'm sure this book will resonate with you.

If you come from the startup scene, you'll also find something valuable here as Jason and David show a dark side of a Silicon Valley's "build it to sell it" mindset.

Book summary:
Rework really shines if you've been in the trenches for a while and you really need that kick to remind you that working harder is not the same as working smarter - or building something that matters to you. I highly recommend it if you're either thinking about building a business or you're looking for a new home and want to find a company that will make sense to you and treats you like a human being.

"Difficulty is what wakes up the genius."

This is a bit of a departure from this list, as it's not a book on design per se. I'm sure you've heard of Nassim Taleb, author of the Black Swan principle, one of the few Wall Street analysts who actually predicted the 2008 crash. The brilliant Antifragile is really hard to peg as it crosses between the realms of finance, design, and philosophy.

The book focuses on a central ideology of building systems that are not just robust (can withstand changes or outside force) but antifragile (they benefit from outside changes). It reconnects architecture and design with the world of nature and reminds us that we are just another social animal, trying to build our (digital) hives.

Especially intriguing is a comparison of natural evolution and human evolution of materials and design. Where humans usually build in spite of their environment, like a tough house to withstand the winds, the evolution "designs" to benefit from it, like a tree growing stronger on a windy hill.

When I think about the systems that we usually design, that is not really designed for anomalies and change, I think we still have much to learn from nature and this book is an excellent primer.

Book summary:
Nassim Taleb joins the world of mathematics, design, and philosophy to create an enticing new way of looking at things - creating systems that benefit from change and natural flows of time.

"While passion and vision are what bring many people to user experience in the first place, it's the successful practice of the craft that keeps them here."

I'd like to end this list with the most practical design book I know. This was my bible when I was first starting as a designer and every time I felt lost, I grabbed the UX Team of One and found the way out. It's an excellent introduction to the craft but will benefit a veteran UX designer as well.

I really love that one of the first points Leah makes is that UX in an organization without support is never going to be easy and she teaches how to lobby for that support. This is a hard-earned lesson as anyone who ever worked in a company without the proper UX process knows. By getting the much-needed advice on how to establish the right methods in a company, the author will save you mistakes you really don't need to make.

The book's second half is really filled with value, introducing the design thinking process and breaking it down into the divergent and convergent phases and their corresponding methods. It provides technical background on how to conduct interviews, facilitate workshops or lead design studio sessions.

Book summary:
Leah Buley provides us with much more than just a great manual for how to be a great UX designers. This book felt like a kind university professor that is always there for me and whenever I felt like a failure it helped to see the light at the end of the tunnel. With it, you can find your professional confidence and learn to trust the process. Yeah, it's good.

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5 UX Books that'll change how you think about design

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"...they force us to keep people at the center of the idea, preventing us from getting lost in mechanical or aesthetic details. They remind us at every moment that we are not dealing with things but with what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "transactions between people and things."

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If , then the classic Photoshop "Blue, Red, Yellow" Gradient is most certainly the Living Coral is the 2019 Pantone color of the year digital marketing pattern of the year:

Spanning the web, you'll see digital marketing sites far and wide using this classic "Instagram" color scheme.

From the popular content aggregator,

To the leading sign-up form platform, Leadformly

Sites all over are going gaa-gaa for gradients.

After all, according to the online design platform, , gradients are a-go and vivid colors are the wave the future.

Looking deeper into design and image trends in the New Year, we may be able to glean inspiration from our big sister in optimization, SEO.

Find a prominent SEO influencer on LinkedIn and chances are, you'll see a little rocket icon strategically placed next to their name.

The brightly colored classic rocket ship has become somewhat synonymous with SEO - a field that continues to skyrocket in popularity.

In fact, a reveals that SEO (blue) completely trumps both Google Trends comparison CRO (red) in terms of interest and web searches. This trend has persisted, since 2004 - even though growth in jumped quickly at the get go. optimization fields

So, why is it that SEO growth continues to outstrip CRO?

There's likely many reasons, including the fact SEO has definitive optimization strategies, where as CRO is more vague. In SEO, follow best practices, and by in large, you can drive traffic to your website. But, in CRO it's not as concrete. There's few best practices that work well on ALL sites for ALL audiences.

And, since there's no steadfast conversion strategies, it's a harder practice to adopt and learn.

But, in 2019, I believe we can learn from from our bigger optimization sister, SEO. How? By considering keywords, as done in SEO.

In CRO, there's no unified keyword, or phrase to label our practice. What do we call our craft? Just plain old Conversion Rate Optimization? CRO? Or, it is Conversion Optimi Conversion Optimization? s ation with an "S"?

There are so many variants and spellings that, from an SEO standpoint, there's no clear keyword for the name of our practice. To grow, I believe we need to create a unified name for our practice so all people looking to learn more can find everything labelled under one roof.

What should our practice be called?

One clue to help point us in the right direction is to look at keyword value, a strategy we can, again, adopt from SEO.

Assessing the value of keywords, on through the free Chrome extension Keywords Everywhere , it's clear the term "Conversion Rate Optimization" has the highest search volume, and is, therefore, the most popular search term:

But, interestingly, Conversion Optimization goes for a much higher cost per click (CPC), showing its more valued and companies are willing to pay more to "own" the term:

The variants Conversion Rate Optimisation and Conversion Optimisation - with an "S" - trail behind, perhaps because they're primarily used only in countries that spell with British English:

So, in 2019, I believe our challenge as an industry is to be able to definitively assert what we're called and what works within the practice. If we can spell these things out - both literally and figuratively - I predict we'll see CRO grow to become both a term and practice as well-known, and as popular as SEO.

There are many other important aspects that will also contribute to the growth of our industry. Here's what some of the top experts think will happen in 2019:

- Trends in Digital Marketing Technology -

Daniel Burstein

At the heart of and So a big trend for 2019 should be testing not just with the hope of a usability improvement on mobile, but with a hypothesis-driven curiosity centered around truly understanding the mobile True understanding conversion rate optimization testing is better understanding the customer. Testing just to improve usability on a device is not enough. We have gotten to the point where our society is now full of customers who are almost cyborgs - their phone is an extension of their commerce (and perhaps their very being). As Ingrid Lunden said on TechCrunch in her article about Black Friday 2018 sales , "mobile overall is coming close to accounting for nearly half of all transactions, a major milestone." increase mobile conversion rates . user. leads to better serving the customer on mobile. And that, ultimately, is the path to

Emily Crume

In 2019, marketers will search for more direct ways to talk to customers.

I predict that 1:1 Messenger marketing and bots will be at the top of the list of technology to explore and deploy.

Digital marketers will also begin to employ more personalized video messaging and content to help keep engagement up on all the social platforms.

- Trends in Customer Experience & Personalization -

Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré

Optimizing the Customer Experience Through Personalization

More businesses and more competition are emerging every day - that's not new. But, what's happening as a result is that the differentiators between businesses (the reason a customer will buy from Business X over Business Y) is becoming less about the products and features (because they're usually very similar between competitors) and more about who provides a better Customer Experience .

Customer Experience (CX), essentially, is becoming a conversion rate optimization strategy.

Customer Experience is a broad term. What I (rather than a bot that knows your name). This might look like chatbots that trigger interactions based on user behavior - if they're looking at a specific product, or act lost on a mean by CX is really personalizing the customer's experience with your brand and customer service. The kind of personalization that happens when you use customer data to offer more relevant solutions, AND, the kind of personalization that feels like an interaction between two human beings website, you could have a chatbot chirp in to ease any source of friction at just the right time. Or, this might look like collecting user data so when they contact customer service, the agent already knows what they bought, what problems they had in the past, and what solutions have already been tried.

Personalization as a trend in CRO hasn't even crested yet. It's still growing! Research is showing that personalization can reduce acquisition costs by half, raise revenue by 5015% and increase the value-per-dollar of marketing budgets between 10-30%.

Of course, the challenge of personalization is scaling it. Which means the trends in tech are going to be around customer experience tools that use automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to deliver increasingly relevant results.

Suneet Bhatt

The biggest CRO Testing Trend in 2019? I believe it will be that more people across every organization will pay attention to CRO and, as a result, pay attention to the customer experience.

Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) are up and it's getting harder to acquire new customers. Most discussions on how to handle these growth challenges place focus on customer support and customer success, as primary growth drivers - I know. I spearheaded the strategy at Help Scout and authored our Support-Driven Growth Strategy.

But, you can't grow only with the customers you already have. You can't turn away from acquisition. Instead, you need to lean into it. And you can't lean into it the way it's been done in the past: spend more money, send more emails, post more on social, write more blog posts. That strategy won't work anymore - actually, it's why customer acquisition costs have increased.

The biggest growth driver in 2019 will be where you spend your time and attention. It will be about making the most of every person coming in contact with your organization. You will achieve growth by paying attention to the people who are paying attention to you.

There's no better way to do that than through CRO - the highest ROI of any marketing investment which, coincidentally, according to a study run by Neil Patel Digital, only accounts for 1.7% of marketing spend.

CRO is the highest ROI way to combat rising CAC - which is why the biggest trend we'll see in our space is more people doing more CRO themselves.

Nathan Collier

Highly Personalized Website Experiences

While it may only start to burgeon in 2019, I think the trend toward personalized website experiences will continue to increase over the next few years. We will eventually see websites that differ based on the user and their journey.

This trend will be similar to what we saw a few years ago when companies really started to segment their email lists to send different messages to different types of subscribers. The same thing is now happening on websites in real-time as companies get better at identifying who's on their site and how those users are behaving.

When done well, it's very powerful for increasing conversions and will only become more sophisticated over time.

Tiffany daSilva

Founder, Flowjo | Most Influential Marketers, Mashable
Flowjo | TiffanyDaSilva

I think the CRO trend I'll be focusing most of my attention on is understanding your audience, based on location.

I've recently been focusing a lot of time this year really understanding what zipcodes and DMA regions get the most conversions and making sure I create specific landing pages for these regions/areas.

I think sometimes we tend to focus all our attention on a landing pages, based on a keyword theme, but fail to realize that different places have different ways of seeing things, or saying things, and those local differences need to be understood.

The best part also is that you can optimize your bids in Adwords and FaceBook using location-based information. So, you can create a test where you increase bids for locations you tend to convert better in, and drop bids in places you don't - instead of removing them entirely.

It's all about finding the perfect balance.

- Growth Trends in CRO -

Gianpaolo Lorusso

If SEO is really dead, CRO is its zombie!

The most clever SEO orphans will naturally transmigrate to Conversion Rate Optimization or will really die themselves (professionally speaking) 😉

Testing and CRO are the future of our business. Not understanding that idea means hard times in the coming years.

Michael Duquet

Testing for lower traffic websites has always been an issue, yet considering that CRO is so ingrained in many organizations, I'd expect that 2019 will see a push for industry benchmarking of the primary actions most B2B websites focus on - asset downloads and lead gen activities.

There hasn't yet been a great way to balance the desire for velocity in testing with lagging sales metrics such as Sales Qualified Leads and Pipeline generation (since testing tends to be focused on immediate actions whereas sales metrics tend to take time), but as CRO matures hopefully some company or individual will create the definitive attribution model that's applied across the community.

Lenny Manor

Top-Rated Growth Marketing Trainer, CRO Strategist
Medium.com

Looking deep into my crystal ball, the future is looking bright for consumers with CRO taking a more elegant approach to personalization.

The near future will see us utilize data more to our advantage, giving the end customer an experience more akin to a face-to-face interaction with every moment tailored, every conversation manicured, and every bit of content connected to the end customers intention.

Where do you see digital marketing and Conversion Rate Optimization headed in 2019? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

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Top CRO Experts' Predictions for 2019: Do They Match Yours? - GuessTheTest

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If , then the classic Photoshop "Blue, Red, Yellow" Gradient is most certainly the Living Coral is the 2019 Pantone color of the year digital marketing pattern of the year: Spanning the web, you'll see digital marketing sites far and wide using this classic "Instagram" color scheme.

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Webdesign tips voor een website die werkt

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Webdesign tips voor een website die werkt

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Total visitors. It's easy to see. Every marketer knows how much traffic they're getting because it's right there in your Analytics. But what happens next isn't as obvious.

That's why giving advice for driving traffic is easy, but web design tips are hard. There are so many factors. Even after 1000+ successful web projects, it's difficult for us to know what will work best.

This article has 27 web design tips for getting more value from every single visitor. Most of these tips are supported by research. These are for beginner designers and advanced UX pros, for small business and big enterprise.

Here is our best advice, ideas and inspiration for designing an effective website. A site that looks beautiful, converts visitors and gets more value from every one of those hard-earned visits.
The two most important studies cited here are at the very end. If you're impatient, skip down!
The Structural Layout of the Website

Websites are two things: containers and content. The container is two things: structure and style. Let's start with the first. These tips are about the structure and layout of the pages.

1. Leverage a visual hierarchy

Every page has a visual hierarchy. If you're not familiar with that concept, here's our definition:

Visual hierarchy refers to the arrangement, size, color and contrast of visual elements. It determines their relative prominence and the order in which they are seen by the human eye.

Web designers use visual hierarchy to guide visitors attention to important elements first. The website layout includes the position (high or low on the page), sizes (big or small), visuals (video, images, icons) and contrast (color and white space).

Combining aspects multiplies their effect. Everyone will see a large video, high on the page. Few people will see low contrast text surrounded by images.

Visual hierarchy is why your eyes follow a certain path on every page you visit on the internet. When used deliberately, it guides the visitor's attention through a series of messages, toward a call to action.

2. Use a descriptive, keyphrase-focused headline high on the homepage

The headline on the top of the homepage (and every page) is either descriptive or not. If not, the visitor may not be able to answer their first question: "Am I in the right place?"

It's also an opportunity to use a target keyphrase and indicate relevance. But a lot of marketers write something clever or vague instead. But clear is better than clever.

Rather than write a fancy, but vague headline, write something descriptive. Make sure that you explain what the company does high up on the page, above the fold.
Source: Outreach Plus
Wait, the fold is still a thing?

Yes, there is a fold. For every visit on every screen, there is a viewable area. At the bottom is the famous fold. To see anything below this line, that visitor must scroll.

Why and if this matters in web design is a hotly debated topic. Here are two of the best arguments: " There is no fold!" vs " The fold still matters."

Of course, there are thousands of screen sizes, ranging from tiny to huge. This website was viewed on 958 different sized screens in the last month. So some designers say the fold is no longer relevant.

But here's the bottom line (get it?) There is still a fold for every visit and still an average fold for all visits. Tools like Hotjar show it clearly as a line in the scroll heatmap, for desktop/laptop, mobile and tablet.

So yes, there's a fold and it matters what you put above and below it. One study showed that visitors spend 80% of their time above the fold.

So put your value proposition, that 8-word version of what you do, high on the page, above the fold.

3. But don't put all of your calls to action at the top

Visitors may be spending more time there, but that doesn't mean that they're ready to take action. A lot of persuasion happens farther down the page.

When Chartbeat analyzed 25 million visits they found that most engagement happens below the fold. Content at the top may be visible, it's not necessarily going to be the most effective place to put your calls to action.
One caveat about this frequently-cited study: Chartbeat is used mostly by news websites, which are very different from marketing websites. No one does much above the fold on a news website! Normal design tips don't apply.
Make sure to put calls to action farther down the page, in any place where interest is likely to be high.

4. Make it a tall page. Answer all your visitors' questions.

More pixels means more space to answer questions, address objections and add supportive evidence. If the visitor doesn't find an answer to an important question, they can simply keep moving down the page. Once they are satisfied, they'll simply stop reading.

The most effective sales pages emulate sales conversations.

You would never cut someone off during a sales meeting and stop answering their questions, would you? That's all a short page does; it stops answering questions.

Here's where the famous study from Crazy Egg comes in. They surveyed their audience, discovered their top questions and concerns, and built a tall page that addresses everything.

The page was 20x longer. The conversion rate went up by 30%.

"Scrolling is a continuation. Clicking is a decision" - Josh Porter, Rocket Insights

5. Show one thing at a time

"I like clean, modern designs." That's what most of our clients tell us when we begin web design projects. They often refer to Apple's website as an example.

Visitors don't like clutter. We like whitespace. In other words, we like low visual complexity.

In 2012, Google set out to discover what types of websites are seen as beautiful to visitors. It's a study about simplicity with a very complicated name: The role of visual complexity and prototypicality regarding first impression of websites: Working towards understanding aesthetic judgments.

They learned that more complex designs are less likely to be perceived as beautiful.

This explains the trend toward single column layouts and tall pages. Designs with multiple columns (left side navigation, content area, right rail) are more complex, with more visual elements within the visitors field of vision.

So cut the clutter. Make one of two elements the focus at each scroll depth.

6. Stick to standard layouts

That same study by Google found that "high prototypicality" also correlates with perceived beauty. In other words, weird isn't usually pretty. A website that follows standards is more likely to be loved.

The sites considered the most beautiful have both high prototypicality and low visual complexity. They are both simple and clean.

Think of it this way, it's good to differentiate your brand, but the layout isn't the place to do it. Be different in WHAT you say. But be typical in HOW your site is used.

Some cars look amazing. They're different. They're beautiful. But they still have doors on the sides, wheels on the bottom and headlights in front.

But what's standard? According to our own research, these are the standard elements for a website:

The "standard" website with high prototypicality includes the following:

Logo in the top left

Horizontal navigation in the header

Search bar at the top

Social icons at the bottom

Mobile responsive design

7. Beware of "false bottoms"

Modern marketing websites, especially the sales pages, are built with page blocks. These are rows of content, often with an image on one site and text on the other, flowing down the page in a single column.

Here's the anatomy of a typical service page on a lead generation website.

As the diagram shows, the footer has a darker background color. So many sites do this that visitors now expect that a switch to a darker background means the bottom of the page.

But if the design has a pageblock with a dark background, the visitor might think they've hit the bottom and stop scrolling. It's a false bottom.

Note: I debate with my own designers about this one. Kurt Cruse, our creative director, makes an excellent point. Changes in background color is a excellent way to let visitors know that the type of content is changing. I hear you, Kurt!

Just be deliberate when selecting background colors for page blocks. To be safe, choose only slight variations or just always use white or light gray. Then switch to dark gray or black in the footer.

8. Avoid carousels and rotating sliders

They've been popular for years and clients love them. But there is a problem with the homepage slideshow: visitors might only see the first slide.

There have been a lot of studies that come to the same conclusion. Messages on subsequent slides are less likely to be seen and calls to action are unlikely to be clicked. Just look at the click through rates for the slides on a university website.

They may be popular because they're easy to get approved. Different stakeholders from different departments all get some pixels above the fold. They're good for internal politics, not for visitors.

Homepage slideshows are good at keeping people from stabbing each other in conference rooms.

So what to do instead?

Stack the slides, so the visitor can see each by scrolling down the page. They will suddenly become much more visible.

Use a featured image, using the one most impactful slide as the hero. Give it a good call to action!

9. Avoid tabs and accordions

Here's another way to take things out of hiding: avoid tabs and expandable boxes of content.

Knowing that up to 76% of website visitors are scanning, you can make your content more visible to them by keeping it all exposed, with no need to click to reveal something.
If tabs and expandable accordions were effective, you'll probably see them on Amazon.
Remember, scrolling is faster and easier than clicking. If the visitors have to aim and click or tab to be able to view something, they are less likely to see it.

Images

Let's move on to the visuals. These tips are specific to the pictures on web pages.

10. Use people pictures

Faces are a uniquely powerful imagery. From the time we are born, we gaze at faces more anything else. The magnetic power of people pictures is very useful in web design.

Not only to faces draw attention, they correlate with conversion. The famous case study by Basecamp showed a huge lift in results when faces and testimonials were combined on a sales page.

Make sure your website doesn't look like an "abandoned spaceship" without a soul onboard.

I've talked to thousands of businesses about their marketing over the years and I've noticed a pattern. Big companies are always trying to look small, and small companies are trying to look big. Strange, right?

Really, every company should just try to be more personal, more human.

11. But avoid stock photos of people

There is a time and place for stock photos, but I would avoid stock photos of people like the plague. They just never feel genuine, therefore they don't build trust.

Companies are tempted by stock photos because the production quality is high. But your visitors care more about reality. They would prefer to see real people who actually work at the company.

Authenticity is more important than polish.

The research backs this up. A study by NN Group found that visitors tune out stock photos of people and "filler" images, but actually look at pictures of real people.

So be yourself, show your team and use pictures of real people, even if they are perfectly polished.

12. Use faces as visual cues

People pictures give you a special opportunity to guide the visitors attention. The famous "you look where they look" phenomenon.

When researcher James Breeze showed designs to 106 people, he demonstrated the power of well-positioned faces. They have the power to direct the visitors attention toward other elements.

This is the famous study with the baby face. When the baby looks at the camera, visitors look at the baby. When the baby looks at the headline, visitors look at the headline.
My friend Oli Gardner is tired of this example with the baby (sorry, Oli!). If anyone knows of other research or good examples, please let me know in the comments!
Use a line of sight in face imagery as a directional cue to guide the visitors attention to benefit statements or calls to action.

13. Use arrows as visual Cues

Faces can guide attention, but they aren't the only way to control the eyes of your visitors. Little hand drawn arrows may be even more effective.

In this eye tracking study by CXL found that a simple arrow was even more powerful at getting visitors to look at a page element.

If you want your visitors to look at something, point at it with an arrow. I'm not sure if this tip is ridiculously obvious or profoundly insightful.

14. Use color to guide visitors' attention toward calls to action

Colors have emotional connotations (red is urgent, blue is calm) and they're part of brand standards. But they are also opportunities to pull the visitors eye toward buttons and CTAs.

A study by Eyequant about button color confirms the power of color and luminance contrast to draw attention.

But the study shows that colorful buttons aren't always effective. If you want your button to be more visually prominent:

Contrast the button color with the background

Contrast the button color and the button text

Contrast the button color with nearby elements on the page (or leave plenty of whitespace around it)

The "Von Restorff Effect"
In the 1930's, German scientist Hedwig von Restorff discovered that when shown a list of ten items, people remember items if they are a color different from the others. This is because the occipital lobe is sensitive to visual differences, or "pattern interrupters."

Web marketer Paras Chopra conducted experiments that showed how standout colors aren't just remembered more, they're clicked more: 60% more!
Pro Tip! Pick an "action color" for all of your links, buttons, and rollover effects. Make it a color that's distinct from the brand colors used throughout the design (these are the "passive colors"). Use the action color nowhere else but in the clickable items.
Navigation and Links

Now we get into the advice for navigation of the site, including the menus, buttons and links that let your visitors move around.

15. Be descriptive

Navigation is always visually prominent, so it's an opportunity to communicate. Visitors typically start their visit by scanning across the header. Anything there, including your menus, are very likely to be seen.

When the navigation labels are generic, you've missed a chance to tell the visitors what you do. Compare these two examples:

If your navigation labels are generic, then they are common to thousands or even millions of websites. You've missed a chance to leverage website navigation best practices, help your visitors and improve your search rankings.

16. Put home on the left, but other than that, don't worry too much about the order of menu items

If you do have a home link, put it on the left. It's the most common place for it, so visitors expect to find it there.

As far as the rest of the menu items, research shows that the order isn't all that important. There are two different eye tracking studies that show a low correlation between the order of menu items and success of visitors ( source and source).

So don't spend a ton of time worrying about the order of things in your menu.

17. Be careful linking from service pages to blog posts

If the visitor is on a service page, the goal is to convert them into a lead. If you add big opportunities to leave and go read your blog, they'll land on pages that are less focused on lead generation. Blog posts naturally have more distractions, exits opportunities and lower conversion rates.

18. Be careful linking to anything on other websites

Whenever relevant, link to things that help the visitor reach their goals. On a blog post, that's often a citation of a source or link to external references. This post links to dozens of articles and studies!

But on service pages and on your homepage, you should link away to other sites with care. For any page optimized to convert visitors into leads, ask yourself, do you really want visitors to click on that link? Does it help you reach your goals?

19. Avoid using social media icons in your website header

Similarly, colorful social media icons in your header isn't great for your goals. If visitors click on any of those candy-colored buttons, they land on a site filled with distractions. They are unlikely to come back.

This is generally the wrong way to do social media integration. If you link to a social network, do so from your footer. Visitors can find the social networks if they're looking, but you're not suggesting that they leave.

Writing

Let's talk about words. Earlier, we recommended a keyphrase-focused headline on the homepage. Here are a few more tips for the writing that goes into the website, including headers, subheads and body text.

20. Write meaningful subheads

Vague subheads are everywhere. They are often large and useless but followed by things that are small but useful. Strange, right? The opposite would make more sense.

Make sure that the big things are meaningful and helpful to visitors. If your subheaders say things like "products" or "services," ask yourself if a more descriptive term would be more helpful. Here are some examples.

This is good for scanners and usability. It's good for the visually impaired and accessibility. It's also good SEO best practices. Never miss a chance to indicate relevance!
ProTip: Subheads may be completely unnecessary. Would this page be just as good without it? Would visitors still know what they're looking at? If so, just remove it.
21. Avoid long paragraphs and long line length

Long, blocky paragraphs do not align with digital content best practices. Simply breaking up long paragraphs makes the content easier to consume. As a general rule, don't write paragraphs longer than 3-4 lines.

"Short paragraphs get read, long paragraphs get skimmed, really long paragraphs get skipped" - Jason Fried, Founder and CEO, Basecamp

If line length is very long, it can be more difficult for visitors to read. The Web Style Guide recommends lines of no more than 12 words.

22. Avoid jargon. Use simple words.

The easier it is the read, the more successful the website will be. Use the common words that visitors expect. Long sentences and fancy words force the temporal lobe to work harder. That's not good.

"Keep it simple! "Cognitive fluency" is a measure of how easily your visitor's brain processes what they are looking at. When something is difficult to read, we unconsciously find it riskier and/or time-consuming. So, to maximize conversion, use short text, simple fonts, and an easy-to-read design." - Roger Dooley, author of Brainfluence

Copy that works well for "low literacy" users works well for everyone. It's not about dumbing it down; it's about using simple language that everyone can understand. Research has shown that bringing down the readability levels can improve the success rate for all visitors.

Even PhDs prefer to read at an 8th-grade level.

That big word might make you sound smart, but it might make your visitor feel dumb. A visitor who doubts themselves is unlikely to take action. So as you write, keep asking yourself this question:
Do 100% of visitors know the meaning of the words on this page?
23. List Order and "Serial Position Effect"

When ordering any lists within your copy, put the important stuff at the beginning and end. The reader's' attention and retention are lowest in the middle of any list. As visitors scan the page, the first and the last items are most likely to stay in short-term memory.
Source: Order Effects Theory: Primacy versus Recency
24. Answer the visitors' top questions

They came with questions. The main job of the website is to answer those questions. Every unanswered question is a missed opportunity to build trust. Unanswered questions also increase the likelihood that the visitor will leave.

When Joel Klettke applied his process finding questions and writing answers, he was able to double the conversion rates on Hubspot landing pages. He interviewed customers, analyzed their answers, prioritized the messages and in the end, he used the words of the audience themselves in the new marketing copy. Smart!

Here are the questions Joel uses to discover visitors' top questions:

1. What was happening that sent you looking for a solution?

2. What else did you try and what didn't you love about it?

3. What almost kept you from buying from us?

4. What made you confident enough to give us a try?

5. What made X the best solution for you?

6. When evaluating X, what was most important to you?

7. What can you do now (or do better) that you couldn't do before?

8. Give me an example of when X made a difference for you?

In one word, what is the purpose of your website? Answer.

25. Add evidence and social proof

The "conformity bias" is the human tendency to do what other people are doing. So giving evidence that others have selected you makes choosing your company seem like a good choice. The goal is to make any decision other than using your company seem outside the norm.

Give your visitors proof that you're legitimate. Ideally, every one of your marketing claims is supported with evidence.

"How many times have you clicked through to a website on a design award winners' list and rolled your eyes at a riveting title tag of "Home"? This is what happens when you trust an agency to "create something totally rad and unique" instead of choosing an agency who promises to build something that will work the way your clients/customers need and expect it to work." - Jen Salamandick, Kick Point

The fastest, easiest way is to add testimonials. Here are other types of social proof.

Endorsements from relevant influencers

Product reviews from customers

"As seen in..." logos of media where your company has been mentioned

Social media widgets showing the size of your following

Trust seals, including association memberships, security certificates, and awards

How much proof is enough? How many testimonials should you add?
A lot. It's possible that there is no such thing as too much evidence. We did a quick analysis of one of Amazon's product detail pages and found that 43% of the page is evidence and reviews.
Pro Tip! Don't make a testimonials page. They tend to be low traffic pages. Instead, add testimonials to every service page.
26. Mention scarcity, trigger "loss aversion"

Humans are not efficient cost/benefit calculators. We tend to overvalue losses and undervalue gains. In other words, losses are more painful than gains are pleasurable.

This is true online and offline and explains a lot of human behavior. This article explains it well: Applying Behavioral Economics And Cognitive Psychology to the Design Process.

This aversion to losses can be useful to web designers and copywriters. Here are some tips for writing copy with loss aversion in mind.

Emphasize the costs of not using your product or service.

Group costs together, list benefits separately.

Emphasize immediate gains.

Create urgency with limited time offers. If the product is scarce, say so.

Gently remind your visitors what they'll miss, risk or lose by not taking action right now.

27. Optimize email signup forms for subscribers

There's one at the bottom of this post. It's a call to action to subscribe. If you look closely, you'll see that it includes three separate elements. These are the 3 P's for email signup forms.

Prominence It stands out within the visual hierarchy

Promise It tells the reader what they'll get an how often

Proof It uses social proof: the number of subscribers or a tiny testimonial

When we first experimented with these changes, the conversion rate on the older form was very low, so the improvement was dramatic. We saw a 4,863% increase in email signups.

When designing your emails signup form, make it visible, use social proof and tell the readers what they're going to get.

More than just a pretty site

Everyone loves beauty. Everyone loves cool new design features. Everyone's a critic. But as visitors, we need more than beauty. We need information. And as website owners, we need results.

Here are two studies with the same finding. The first is a survey by Hubspot that shows visitors value easy to find information more than beautiful design or fancy UX.

This second study is the conclusion of a set of user tests by NN Group. It shows that when visitors fail, it's because they can't find information, not because the site isn't beautiful enough.

I love beautiful design as much as anyone. It's why I got started in this business! And I often think of this quote:

"The life of a designer is a life of fight. Fight against the ugliness." - Massimo Vignelli, design legend

But in web design, we create containers for content. And the visitors came for the content, not the container.

Websites should be beautiful. They should have a visual or emotional impact on the visitors. But the success of your website goes far beyond beauty. It's about helping visitors find what they need. That is the heart of every tip in this article. And it's the true purpose of web design.
Help your visitor find what they came for, and then give them what you want them to have.

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27 Research-Backed Web Design Tips: How to Design a Website That Works | Orbit Media Studios

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Total visitors. It's easy to see. Every marketer knows how much traffic they're getting because it's right there in your Analytics. But what happens next isn't as obvious. That's why giving advice for driving traffic is easy, but web design tips are hard. There are so many factors.

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A marketing plan is like your groceries list.

One does not simply go to the supermarket without a groceries list.

Unless you are Paris Hilton or a Kardashian/Jenner/ spell your name with a K, of course (not you, "Carol with a K") and you are not on a budget, you just make money simply by metabolizing oxygen and expelling carbon dioxide (cc: Sheldon Cooper).

Then, this marketing plan is not for you. Go feed your flying unicorn pack some rainbows.

Now, for the rest of us with a budget, marketing plans are the only way to map out our way in the [super]market.

This is the only way to make sure you don't waste your budget and you actually use everything you bought and those avocados don't go bad. Not this time. Not on your watch.

This year we take over the world

...with a groceries list. Now that I've talked some supermarket sense into you, let's talk marketing plan.

What is a Marketing plan?

The smart way to making it big is to have a plan. Let's get geeky:

The definition of a marketing plan is the orderly and structured representation of scheduled marketing actions. These refer to actions to be launched in the foreseeable future (3-5 years), in a way that fulfills the company's potential and remains true to its corporate values, audience, and staff.

Simply put, a marketing plan is a systematic way for a company to track, measure, plan and schedule their options. In a world changing so fast, a marketing plan can get quite complicated as it brings together many different departments, approval from the Board of Directors, and so on.

A marketing plan is to be adhered to, but it is subject to change following trends or changes (e.g. in the external environment, the company, etc.)

There are two types of marketing plan; the tactical marketing plan and the strategic marketing plan. The tactical plan typically only consists of short-term plans for the upcoming year or so, whereas strategic marketing plans make up an orchestrated sum of marketing actions overarching the following three to five years.

End of geeky.

Which are the Marketing plan benefits?

Long story short, you get rich and don't waste money, and every single penny you spend has a measured goal to achieve once invested. Thanks to a marketing plan:

You stay ahead of the curve

Owing to a marketing plan example you can ensure consistency throughout the organization, always stay sure that any emerging opportunities (or threats) will go under your microscope. This will also give you the time required to get set and meet change.

You sustain your USP

In other words, with the marketing plan at hand, you get to hold on to your competitive advantage for longer because it no longer is detached from other variables. Instead, your competitive advantage now makes an integral part of your breathing marketing plan. So, whenever one of the variables which render it unique change, it changes. Tracking changes will never be easier!

Everyone in the company shares the same vision

A marketing plan requires the involvement of all levels of management in the planning process. So, sharing a Marketing plan proposal among executives helps ensure that everyone is on the same page. Smooth communication and a common path for a cross-functional team are really essential. This will also help reduce the number of conflicts among individuals and departments.

You remain market-focused

Finance-wise, a marketing plan template has made provisions regarding the allocation of scarce resources and their rationalization and a more market-focused orientation across the organization.

Now that we got these out of the way, let's get practical. Introducing your mission and vision.

What is a Mission statement? Why do I need a Vision statement?

Maybe you don't need a Mission statement.

I mean, you don't mind initiating every single new employee, introducing them to what the company stands for, what problem your business is here to solve, where you see the company in few year's time, and inspiring them to work for an ultimate goal every other day or so, right?

Thought so.

I think that checking out two examples of the best mission and vision statements will help.

Here are the mission and vision examples by Google and LVMH (Louis Vuitton group of companies, sister!):

When writing your mission, the difficulty lies with making it concise and descriptive enough for those who haven't heard of your business.

Here's how Google picked their words

Mission statement: "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

To write your mission is to know where you are going as a company, make it specific but not limit it or restrict what your company could stand for in the future.

Google's vision is to "provide access to the world's information in one click".

Now, when Google released Google Glass they were taking a step towards that direction. More than that, a pair of glasses ("goggles") was aligned with the very core of their brand.

This is another one of my personal favorites; the mission and vision statement by LVMH.

Mission statement: "The mission of the LVMH group is to represent the most refined qualities of Western "Art de Vivre" around the world. LVMH must continue to be synonymous with both elegance and creativity. Our products, and the cultural values they embody, blend tradition and innovation, and kindle dream and fantasy.
In view of this mission, five priorities reflect the fundamental values shared by all Group stakeholders:

- Be creative and innovate
- Aim for product excellence
- Bolster the image of our brands with passionate determination
- Act as entrepreneurs
- Strive to be the best in all we do."

I really don't know if I could take a word out of this mission statement or even replace one word. Of course, knowing the brand's portfolio and the brand value the group of companies has established over these years does help to make this mission statement a lot more powerful than it would be for another company just starting out. This is due to the brand perception and, well, they have earned it!

With regard to the Vision statement of LVMH this is what I found:

"LVMH has successfully preserved a family spirit that places priority on long-term vision. The Group's vocation is to ensure the development of each of its Houses while respecting their identities and their autonomy, providing the resources needed to create, produce and market their products and services through carefully selected channels.
The three fundamental values articulated by Bernard Arnault are shared by every member of LVMH. These three imperatives inspire excellence and constitute the pillars of our performance and long-term success."
Now go back to your own mission and vision statements and make them as good.

How to write your mission and vision statement

First, the facts:

Your mission is the pain your business is here to cover for.

Express it as a solution, use words that show the benefit your business is providing.

Your vision is how you take this solution you are currently offering to the next level in the future.

Remember to be concise and inspirational. The more clearly and eloquently you articulate your vision the more highly you will engage your employees in the vision.

Oh, and don't be lazy. You know you won't get it right the first time; you'll need to write it a number of times. Ask the employees who have been with you the longest to chip in. A/B test with new employees and with your website visitors. Refine. Repeat as necessary.

Next up, your corporate values.

Why your company's value system is your strongest wealth indicator

Your choice of company values serves as the central pillar of everything you do. Your employees will, in turn, instill these values in everything they do, from designing the product/service, to marketing it, to improving the user experience.
Why are they your company's wealth indicator?
Because they guarantee your stay true to your promise towards your staff and customers. To stay true is to be consistent with what you set out to do in the first place.

Your company's value system shows what you value more, your priorities; is that preservation of tradition? Is it the protection of the environment through the development of sustainable products? Or is it the democratization of a high-end product or service by offering a radical alternative?

Your value system could stand for a number of things. And while you could have some values in common with other companies, you should have a value mix that is unique to your business.

Now that values are said and done, here come the corporate objectives.

Corporate objectives are the business way to say "#GOALS"

You've earned it; you did the writing part, mission, vision, values, now it's time to be #goals.

1. Setting your corporate objective is to determine you are in it to win it (i.e. profitability) or be the market leader, provide better customer service, and so on.

2. Here you can add the business boundaries you expect to come up against: R&D expenses, distribution channels, personnel training, social responsibility aspects, corporate image, etc.

Once you do that, it's the perfect lead-in for your marketing audit.

What is a Marketing audit?

The marketing audit is the evaluation of the internal and external environment. The objective is to adapt your newly-set corporate objectives so as to emerge with an actionable plan.

Finding the market to be rich in.

Getting started with Market Research

Find below everything you will need to draft the best Marketing plan even Gary Vee would be envious of.

You can't possibly set out to start a successful business and marketing plan without running a quick market audit.

Easy marketability is a thing of the past.

Therefore, expecting to ride a tidal wave of growth might not be very realistic, unless your industry is yet to be disrupted.

In an increasingly saturated market you need to make sure you are more disciplined than a 5-year-old at Disneyland.

Know your Kryptonite in a target market: PESTEL analysis

Here is an important aspect to consider every time - or maybe six aspects: it's called PESTEL and stands for the political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal aspect of the target market. A few years back it used to be just PEST analysis, but recently, there has been increasing pressure to upgrade with Environmental and Legal aspects as well.

The political environment of your business plays an important role in your company's well-being. For example, an unstable political system could be the cause of changing circumstances, thus a varying purchasing power of consumers. Other variables influenced by the political environment are trade restrictions or the extent to which legislation is passed.

A market's economic environment is the most direct influence of a business' performance. Economic pointers such as economic growth, exchange rates, inflation or consumers' purchasing power, etc.

The analysis of the social environment helps to anticipate the circumstances and mode of operation in one country. In other words, social unrest in a target market might influence the market attractiveness.

As for the technological context of a market, you need to find out whether it is ready for your product.

Environmental issues refer to ethically-sourced products, sustainable companies, or carbon footprint guidelines. These must be preserved so as for companies to thrive and for consumers to accept them.

Legal factors may refer to anything from equal opportunities in a society to advertising guidelines and standards to consumer rights or product label design.

No, STP doesn't stand for "Spill The Paint"

Spill painting is not easy, I'm telling you.

Thankfully, our Marketing strategy requires the STP method as in the Segmentation-Targeting-Positioning triptych.

It is essential to plan our marketing actions because it will guarantee the future of our business. HALLELUJAH.

Segmentation: Market and customer segmentation occur as a result of filters that marketers apply across a market in order to discover the more relevant segments and potential customers.

Targeting: Evaluate the attractiveness of the customer segments and the projected commercial success. Choosing your segments wisely is really important. One segment might be more financially stable than another at the given moment in time, but maybe in a few months' or years' time this segment changes. We need to anticipate where our customers are and customize our product and communication accordingly.

Positioning: This is a strategic decision and process carried out by a brand. It is concerned with associating the brand with a particular perception in consumers' minds. The objective of this stage is to convey the product's differentiation from the competition in a rational, not an emotional way (i.e. branding).

Say hello to your very own ...SWOT team

Similar to PESTEL analysis, SWOT analysis goes beyond the external environment of the business and holistically examines the internal environment, too.

Internal characteristics of the company

Strengths - refer to the strengths of the product or service over those of the competitors. Writing these down and finding a way to build up on them and improve them further still is essential.

Weaknesses - refer to the room for improvement and progress for our product. With every new competitor, this list could change.

External environment of the company

Opportunities could refer to anything from being the right product in the right market at the right time, or a technological advancement that could help lower your production costs, etc.

Threats are a concise way to bring in everything your PESTEL analysis showed, as well as market trends, etc.

USP is like UPS... in that it helps you deliver more packages

Your eshop/business/service needs a Unique Selling Proposition to prove it is different from the products in the same category.

In an abrasive environment such as today's, you need to establish your uniqueness in a way that is memorable and emphasized throughout your ads.

To draft your USP (and later submit it with your creative brief) you should also bring in what you want your USP to be in the future.

You don't want to be stuck with a dated USP.

Think about your ideal customer

In a marketing plan template we expect to see examples of buyer personas.

A buyer persona is the ideal customer for our business.

Much more than "My ideal customer is devastatingly rich and needs to buy my product in bulk every other day" (really, how niche is that?), a lot more research and thinking goes into a buyer persona.

Set realistic objectives so that cousin Joe doesn't get off on your failure

I mean, that guy's never amounted to anything. But he'll jump at the opportunity to make fun of you at the Thanksgiving dinner in front of everyone.

When setting Marketing objectives, you need to keep in mind that there is no proportional relationship between the budget you spend and the goal you achieve.

For instance, if a total budget of $3m got you 30% increase in traffic, does not guarantee that $6m will get you twice as much.

In other words, when setting goals, in order to take into consideration the underlying variables which you might otherwise miss, go for an overarching goal such as "Be a leader in the market in 2 years' time".

Essentially, this would require on your behalf to meet the demands of the market and the sales forecast, that is to say, to be able to anticipate where the market is going in the coming year and be there.

Suppose the market is experiencing an upward trend, and to be the market leader there would be a subsequent 10% increase requirement made on your part.

Estimating the budget to put your brand ahead of your competitors and increase your revenue is a cross-functional action that requires careful investigation.

Have a plan B; all cool heroes have one

Is there a plan B, C, and Z?

As competition crops up, you must be prepared to change your marketing objectives, or better, to adapt them to the new circumstances.

Given that pressure does not constitute the ideal circumstances for making a decision, it is best you have your own list of ideas and actions to take.

I like to have a set of alternative plans, in case let's say one of our top 5 competitors changes their pricing or in case they start developing the features we already have in place.

This means that I keep separate records of these ideas and fill them in at every given chance. Better safe than sorry.

So, what if your current marketing objectives are, say, to increase Facebook following, boost conversions, lower production costs, and a new competitor offers a product that is the same quality as yours for a third of the price?

You'll need to focus on branding your product's USPs and spend some of your budget communicating that, since it would be a really bad idea to reposition your brand at that moment.

You survived the first part of the trilogy. Now let's stretch that brain of yours some more.

Cooking with the Rookie: The 2nd phase of Taking over the world

All Marketing Mix variables interact.

Traditionally we've learned that marketing corresponds to all marketing actions relating to product place price and promotion. And it makes perfect sense:

The product refers to designing your product and its characteristics based on your audience and its needs, compared to the competition, the needs of the market, and so on.

Price is about choosing a price that is affordable by your target audience, can guarantee your company's long-term sustainability, ability to match the advertising spending of your competitors, and psychologically priced so that it will encourage people to shop more, but also allow marketers to make discounts and still keep the brand sustainable.

Place, as in deciding what the best place to sell your product is, how many resellers they should be in every area, and so on. In other words, if you are starting a chocolatier shop at a "diabolical place" to do business from in Scotland, chances are you'll need a real tear-down by Dragon's Den investors to move people.

Promotion, regarding the way you choose to market your product and communicate the message every time, the number of ads you choose to put every quarter, the channels you choose to launch your marketing in, the content you create for each of these channels.

Beyond the traditional Marketing Mix - Meet the extended Marketing definition

Packaging

Packaging is considered to be the fifth P of the Marketing Mix.

I cannot help but sound biased here but, as a person who has written a 200-page book on Packaging, I cannot overstate its importance for whether your product leaves the shelf or not.

One of the things I like to say is that we look at the inside of a gift with the look we got from the wrapping paper.

If you are taking a long-term approach for your product, packaging should be one of the most important variables to look at and budget for before you begin.

Also, it might be of interest to you that Packaging could be the reason why your brand becomes viral.
People
The sixth P stands for people as in the people who represent your business and what it stands for.

If you own a physical store, it's the people who say good morning to your customers, the person cleaning your displays and store, and so on; everyone contributes to your customers becoming regulars and from there becoming brand loyal or brand evangelists.

So, this respect should go both ways: In the same way that you respect and honor the people who work for you and hold the business while you are not there, they should respect the hard work that you've put in this business and run it successfully the way you do.

Physical evidence

If your business is a service then you should keep in mind that all services are faced with 4 major challenges, namely: heterogeneity, perishability, inseparability, and intangibility.

This means that heterogeneity needs you to have ensured that however many employees of yours many have to help out a customer. The latter's experience will be smooth and flawless.

Perishability is that if you own a massage store then you will need to deliver a designated number of massages every month so that you get your money's worth for your employees. However, if that number of massages does not go away then you will have lost an amount of money which cannot be returned, ergo perished.

Inseparability occurs when your service cannot be experienced anywhere else but in the premises of your business. This could be the case with the bank, or the massage store, for example. With e-banking, however, this aspect of challenges associated with services has been tackled.

Intangibility occurs when you pay for a service and get nothing tangible, such as yoga classes, traveling abroad, banking services, etc. To make up for this, yoga classes give out membership cards, traveling agencies give out print ticket holders, banks give out passbooks, and so on and so forth.

Life cycle analysis

Last, life cycle analysis is to estimate the life cycle of your product or service in a way that helps you understand how your average customer experiences your offering.

By understanding their behavior you will be able to design a better product extension or brand extension.

Knowing this will also inform the sizes of your product that you have available for selling or the pricing itself.

For example, suppose you notice that your product lasts for a month or two to your average user and you've priced it as if the repeat purchase is going to occur twice every month.

This is an indication that maybe your business is not sustainable and you will break even in two years, that is, if you last that long.

"Marketing objectives" is all about making it first to the cheese counter

Mapping your journey is essential for the Marketing plan recipe we are working on.

Before we begin, we must set out our plan and realistic objectives for the coming year, along with a provision for the years to come.

The way to talk about goal-setting in marketing plan would be in terms of benefit sought:

Brand awareness and brand recall

If you are looking to increase brand awareness and brand recall across your audience, set out a plan that integrates the marketing channels which are bound to prove the most useful to you in the process.

For example, if you own a fashion e-commerce store, one way to go about this is to launch a campaign that is logo-heavy and brand identity charged so as to make your audience more familiar with the brand.

On a first level, this occurs subliminally and rather unconsciously. As we move further along, your audience is being trained (on its own) to recognise your branding, brand identity, logo, and so on.

This might take a little more budget to achieve, with simultaneous campaigns run across channels: for instance, YouTube, Facebook and lookalike audiences, and so on.

Do make sure your logo is in as many of your posts as possible, make your name more memorable by incorporating a pun of sorts which will encourage recall, or add a very characteristic jingle to your brand, which is always bound to reinforce brand associations between your business and the intended feeling you wish to elicit.

Increase conversions

Giving your conversions a helping hand also relies greatly to the industry you are in. This means that you may also need to consider satellite variables which play a role in your conversion rate.

For example, will your conversions occur as a function of increasing your sales manpower? Will it be a matter of automating certain aspects of your business?

For instance, conversational marketing platforms can help delegate certain tasks before they start piling up in your inboxes. Another idea is to automate certain tasks with Webhooks or your CRM system.

If you own a fashion eshop, you can set up email marketing automated drip campaigns and send Upselling/Cross-selling campaigns, Website re-engagement campaigns, and so on.

Increase website traffic

This one is rather an ongoing task on your website, at least it should be. You can't simply rely on your existing traffic, you can't rest on your laurels, however comfortable they are.

You need new website traffic generated regularly, which is then fed into your email marketing automation campaigns, your social media network, and so on.

Once you set up this schedule, remember to track its progress and revise it on the reg.

Increase user engagement

To get your users to engage with your brand, you really need to establish a culture that inspires just that with your audience.

You need to speak their language and share their interests ( buyer personas will come in really handy here). User engagement does not happen overnight; it is gradually built over time and once achieved, it's merely a state, so you really need to maintain that throughout.

Your every post and marketing action will be leading to interaction, but should not do so directly every time, or it will soon wear your audience out.

For instance, ending every post with "What would you do?" or "Have you ever seen...? Let us know in the comments section", etc, could be a good tactic... if you don't overdo it.

Increase brand loyalty

Suppose you've been many years in the industry and more competitors are mushrooming every year.

Worse, yours is a commodity product therefore you cannot differentiate your product. By identifying this challenge in your market, it is important to aim at increasing brand loyalty.

To achieve this, focus on improving your user experience, rewarding your most frequent shoppers thus reinforcing their behavior, sending customers discounts on their most frequently viewed or purchased products (don't know how to do that? Book a demo with one of our representatives here).

Increase customer base

Bringing in more customers (or paying customers if you offer a free plan as well) goes under lead generation and lead nurturing.

To achieve that, there is a Marketing Calendar worksheet bundle to help you organize your marketing actions and day-to-day tasks and operations for the new year!

By using the sheets you will be able to easily track, monitor, scan, organize, review, and rearrange your tasks without leaving anything behind! (The perks of having a master procrastinator prepare these worksheets is that everything has been considered, even writer's block. On the downside, we published the worksheets mid-December, so...yeah. That's on me, too.)

Increase revenue (net price received)

To increase your revenue, you can aim at a number of things, such as:

increasing the average order value per customer

entering a new market

extending your current product line

achieving economies of scale by producing under a white label

checking your price elasticity across your target market and highlighting some added benefits, accordingly. This could help increase the perceived value of your products by upgrading your offering and differentiate it from your competition.

It all really depends on the industry you are in. So, here's some inspiration and take it from here.

Increase profit (e.g. via ROI, ROS, SVA)

The next years could be all about increasing your return on investment, return on sales, shareholder value added, etc. Choosing what the main priority for your company is, is of the essence at this time in year.

Decrease costs

This could be another marketing objective for your business, whether it refers to production costs or automating certain processes so as to increase productivity in your team and put your manpower to better use.

Decrease ecological footprint (environmental impact)

With a growing percentage of environmentally-conscious consumers, choosing to protect your impact on the environment by creating fully recyclable (or biodegradable, better yet) packaging could be your differentiation factor.

You're gonna love what's up next.

It's Show Time: Meet IMC, the Cool Kid of the Block

If you haven't met before, the Integrated Marketing Communications plan (IMC) is that fancy pantsy spreadsheet. It shows the exact duration of every one of your marketing actions. It's like you are the director of a scene lasting an entire year.

So, be prepared to say "Action" at the top of your voice. And when you do, what happens?

What will be set in motion? Who will do what? For how long? Will the kids in the scene run around throughout the play? Or will they stand up and start running during intervals? Will they just run on cue, depending on what the audience seems to be enjoying or not?

Before you do anything, be sure to run a site-wide audit. Optimize your website pages and don't forget to optimize your landing pages for conversion. Otherwise, everything that follows will turn into useless spells.

Define your audience

If you were to explain what you do as a marketer to a 5-year-old and a grown man/woman, would you do it in the same way? Would it take the same amount of time? Would you use the exact same words? You would probably use some examples or analogies, but different ones in each case. That's called essential intelligence and also goes by "defining your audience".

It's the most important step of the process, second only to "What is your goal?".

So, once you articulate your goal, you define your audience. This will help you choose the platform to advertise on so as to reach the audience more easily, the language to use in order to craft a message that feels personal and natural to the audience, and to stay relevant, that is to talk about what your primary audience is interested in.

How your Advertising mix can do the trick

First, let's decide what your advertising mix will look like. You have a lot of options there, so what I like to do is start with the ideal version of the Advertising mix I would like to have for the coming year.

Regardless of the available budget, I always prefer to see what I want to do and then what I can do. Most of the time I can come up with an alternative plan that will make up for what I can't do, a little guerrilla of a tactic, but works like a charm.

Advertising could be anything from Email Marketing and Automations ( wink wink), Print ads, Radio or TV commercials, and Social media planning and ads. Yep, that's a lot.

I'll be starting with the more friendly-priced options, starting with what can guarantee consistent presence throughout the year.

Then, I correlate that to what worked for us the previous year and what the market trends are showing. For the latter I will be doing my fair share of research online, some following the respective hashtags on Linkedin, pick my favorite bloggers' brains, look up Google trends in the target markets I'm interested, and so on.

Before I shortlist my advertising options, I need to pick the goal each of the aforementioned media does a better job at achieving.

So, what is my number one goal? Establish an online presence? Increase average order value? Remain a top-of-mind choice? Outdo my competition? Establish my USP? Increase brand loyalty?

Most of the above can be achieved with email marketing and social media ads.

Why Email Marketing is the go-to tool for marketers:

1. It is targeted because it "works" with data your consumers have provided willingly and is not intrusive like Facebook or Instagram ads, while it only costs a fraction of the average social media budget.

2. Email Marketing has a return on investment equal to 1:40; for every pound you spend, you get 40 pounds in return.

3. Marketing Automations take over the mundane and repetitive day-to-day tasks such as Thank-You emails, Welcome emails, and so on. At the same time, Automations help with automatic delegation of requests to the right people, thus improving response times and enhancing customer experience.

Automate your work: Set it and forget it

From Welcome emails to Thank you emails, to Onboarding sequences and so on, Email Marketing and Automations can take a load off of your chest by triggering emails when specific actions occur.

For instance, as soon as someone signs up on our platform, they get an email welcoming them to our service. A few minutes later they get an email describing what they can do on the platform and they are invited to book a live demo with one of our representatives. Then, they are shown examples of other users and how they achieved their goals (case studies), and so on.

Lead your customers further down the funnel with personalization, minus the effort. Check out these 10 amazing examples of drip campaigns.

Beef up consistency and brand loyalty

Putting your subscribers under your spell only takes an automated email; with Happy Birthday drip campaigns you can rest assured that your subscribers feel valued and that your brand remains top of mind. Couple these with Loyalty campaigns which reward frequent shoppers or VIP customers, and you got a checkmate in two moves.

Get more conversions without breaking a sweat

One of the preset campaigns we pride ourselves in, here at Moosend, is that of Weather-based product recommendations. You can have advanced, weather-based emails shooting out when the weather is sunny or rainy, making spot-on product recommendations ("Hey Danny, quite hot, innit? Here's a USB Fan!").

Apparently, we didn't jump to weather-based drip campaigns; we designed a bundle of Recipes to really raise the bar here.

Turn up user engagement a notch or two

Website re-engagement, Re-engagement of inactive subscribers, or countdown timers, are just some of the email marketing and automation tools

Every time you run campaigns (online or offline) potential customers will visit your e-commerce store or website. If they leave empty-handed, your ad spendings will go to waste.

But you can get multiple times your money's worth by setting up website tracking and inviting users to sign up for your newsletter through a simple pop-up.

This will help our AI systems identify them as unique visitors and will reach out to them every time you run a re-engagement campaign to lure them back with a nice and warm discount.

Why Digital Communications deserve a digital marketing plan of their own

One of the most common ways to drive new traffic to your website is through Facebook ads (possibly with some help from Instagram ads or LinkedIn ads, whichever matches your brand personality).

With video marketing becoming more and more powerful every day, Facebook and Instagram are emerging as virtually the only two fully exploitable networks for marketers.

Facebook

This is your strongest tool right now, and it is important that you make the most of its available data and advanced tools. Create Custom Audiences using your Mailing lists and run campaigns. Go bigger by creating Lookalike Audiences automatically and thus enhance your performance. You'll find more information in our Marketing Calendar.

Instagram

Instagram is the new, up-and-coming Facebook. Remember to grow your account organically and not buy followers. Create original content, consider video content, interact with users. One of my tried-and-tested practices on Instagram is to like your followers and other users' photos. Always follow users back because the algorithm rewards you for staying active. Shedding users regularly might not be too helpful.

Twitter

Twitter is particularly useful for commentary on trending topics in a way that is fresh and sassy. Not exactly the ideal place to build your revenue but a good place to start earning your brand some social credit.

Linkedin

With Linkedin your tasks are twofold: one is your company's Linkedin page and the other one is your own. Your personal branding does not stop when you launch your business idea; it escalates. Stay consistent in everything you do.

Zest.is is a relatively new hub for content marketers. If you've published a new article, you can share it as a suggestion on Zest.is and, once approved by administrators there, it will be shared across other marketers who are looking into the #specifictopic you have submitted.

Growthhackers is a community where you can connect with more marketers and exchange ideas on original content that is shared on the platform- this is a great networking tool, as well.

Reddit requires no introduction; the highly-engaged and high-standard sub-reddits are an exciting exploration space. Discover unique content and interact with radical professionals.

Other networks include Medium, Vero, Pinterest, Tumblr, and so on. Other ways include referrals, affiliate marketing, and Google ads:

Referral systems, such as Maitre, are an automated way to launch viral contests; essentially, by way of gamification, you reward users for sharing your contest with their friends or for tagging them, by granting them more entries for the competition or early access to your product/service, a discount, etc.

Affiliate marketing is a great way to let your customers do the selling for you. They say that there is no better way to promote a product or service than word of mouth.

Well, affiliate marketing is a unique combo of word of mouth marketing and referral marketing.

The awesome thing about finding the best affiliate marketing is that it enables you to enjoy multiple times the benefits of closing deals by employing the same number of salespeople.

Your affiliates are only paid if their leads convert within a designated period and if so, you get to keep 70-80% of the amount and the affiliate gets a 20-30% commission.

Google Ads is a chapter in and of itself, so it cannot be sufficiently covered in a couple of lines. It is arguably a complicated procedure the usefulness of which has been questioned from time to time in terms of time required to master the technique and final results.

In the meantime, check out our UBER MARKETING CALENDAR WORKSHEETS, you'll find more information on Inbound Marketing, SEO, Content Marketing, Google Analytics, and many more.

Influencers

Designing your strategy on any of these networks requires consistent content creation of high quality.

This means that your business could use a helping hand from influencers with proven authority in your industry and their own engaged audience.

This way, a collaboration with them will be successful and effective at adding value to your business.

In the same category, you can explore other options such as endorsers, that is, collaborating with celebrities for product placement or synergies with other brands which share the same core values as your business.

Your Sales Promotions are so much more than just a pretty face

When are you doing your sales promotions and discounting in the year? Do you follow the industry dates alone?

For instance, if you are in e-commerce, there are certain days you can hardly get past, such as Black Friday or summer sales.

If all your competitors are joining in, chances are you probably will, too.

Marking these days on your IMC plan helps you set up the social media and other planning ahead of time with posts, offers, campaigns, etc.

Corporate Social Responsibility is not just for Coca-Cola

You don't need to earn millions before you help others.

For a thriving business, giving back to the community should be at the heart of what it does.

Whether it is in the form of sponsoring an athlete or an event (e.g. a Marathon), it shows what this business stands for and that it is not sheerly profit-oriented.

Finding a cause that your business could stand behind and support in a consistent way is of the essence; discover an NGO which is aligned with your branding and core values.

If I may add a personal comment, anything that goes under "part of the proceeds goes to" would not suffice- as a consumer, I find this rather vague and unclear.

Your support could be in kind or through volunteering, even synergizing with an NGO for special occasions in the year (e.g. Christmas), but it should always be there.

It's like becoming a parent to that NGO or cause in general.

So, my advice would be to come to an agreement with the representatives in any case so as to have an evolving relationship with the cause/NGO and support in more and better ways.

Last, but not least, it is important to note that CSR can serve as a differentiating factor for commodity products!

Set Sales and set sail

OK, I get that, maybe this is not entirely your task, but it's essential that Sales and Marketing have some common goal-setting sessions and alignment.

After all, it is salespeople who take on the personal selling task and they must be as updated as possible.

N umber of salespeople required

Of course, you will know better the number of salespeople you will be needing. If you are just starting out, here is one thing you could consider; if 4 salespeople can bring in X revenue, it doesn't mean that 8 of them will bring in 2X revenue.

You see, past a certain point, sales do not increase proportionately to the number of people working on the deals, and things become more complicated as one market gets saturated faster.

You should choose a number of salespeople that brings in the necessary amount of money and that still allows you to break even, making it thus a worthwhile investment for you.

Training your salespeople

This remains key to building brand equity and brand loyalty and taking the long-term approach

What remains of the essence here is to remember that it is your salespeople who communicate directly to your clients if you are in B2B and that it is Sales who should be adding to brand loyalty.

Establishing their pitch adds to the branding

Closing the sale goes far beyond incoming revenue; sales must be there to reassure the newly-turned customers that their choice was a good one so that the stage of cognitive dissonance is overcome with instantly and the clients do not experience uncertainty.

Pricing comes into play

Your brand's pricing says a lot about where your brand stands in the ocean of brands. It helps position your brand and differentiate from other competitors since pricing can serve as a differentiating factor per se.

Discounting as part of your branding

Discounting is no random act of kindness, instead, it is a scheduled plan with measurable results against preset objectives to estimate the performance and efficiency of campaigns launched.

More specifically, with regard to discounting, there are regular discounts, such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, summer sales, Christmas sales, and so on.

Then, there are regional sales, such as Boxing day to mid-January in the UK.

And of course, there are industry-specific discounts, such as National Doughnut day- if you run a doughnut place, this will be a great opportunity for a get-together.

The problem with small businesses is that they often lack the resources to estimate their pricing in such a way so that they remain sustainable and manage to develop.

To save you an entire book chapter on this, here is a quick real-life experience from my life before Moosend:

I remember working for this small business and the founder only knew that in order to be profitable he would have to sell beyond a certain pricing point.

But they hadn't considered so many variables.
Was pricing going to differentiate our brand?
Could pricing account for inflation or accommodate discounts for bulk buying, negotiate other prices or take into account high shipping fees?

Here is an entirely new chapter that neither the founder nor the highly experienced (with more than 20 years of expertise in the field) Chemist saw coming; products were bound by MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheet) documents which were required for cosmetics to board a plane.

But when the Eau de parfum came out (see alcohol-based, ergo inflammable), no MSDS was enough and even more documents were required. These cost extra to get and of course increased the total cost of transportation via airplane. As a result, the company had to absorb these price changes so that the end user wouldn't have their experience compromised.

Another aspect that no accountant could have foreseen was that pricing means positioning, but positioning means different means of advertising in every tier.

For example, you may have chosen to be upper-end of the market but if you choose to advertise on Facebook or Instagram, you might never make headlines.

As for low-end users, you won't be able to outperform your competition and you will definitely be outspent in the end.

Indicatively, other pointers to look up further are the following:

Inflation (absorbing tax increases or not, etc.)

Logistics and distribution channel

Being an international seller comes with inventory costs or higher shipping fees

Customer journey & Customer experience

After-sales service

Conclusion

The entire marketing plan overview with its main elements is in this article.

I have hyper-squeezed everything in here and you have everything you need to get started.

This article will only get better when you combine it with the most actionable Marketing Calendar worksheets the world of Content Marketing has ever seen.

That's a promise.

Don't forget to register on your way out to take over the world.

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Marketing Plan: From Zero to Hero [Free 2019 Calendar Included]

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A marketing plan is like your groceries list. One does not simply go to the supermarket without a groceries list. Unless you are Paris Hilton or a Kardashian/Jenner/ spell your name with a K, of course (not you, "Carol with a K") and you are not on a budget, you just make money simply by metabolizing oxygen and expelling carbon dioxide (cc: Sheldon Cooper).

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Have you ever felt like the most overworked person in your team? We all did. The main reason for your suffering was avoiding to use digital tools for agencies or using the wrong tools. Before going into detail, let me first tell you a short story.

When I was little, I use to draw mythical creatures with dozens of hands attached to their enormous bodies. Later on, I would often remember those characters, especially during the tough times at work.

What I want to say is, the more tasks I would have to do at once, the more I would wish to have multiple hands. Luckily, the digital era has given us the tools we need to stay on time and focused. These tools certainly come in handy if you have a room full of people who have to surpass themselves day in and day out.

In other words, smart software can serve as a dozen hands in the life of an agency employee. Let's see which of the top 20 digital tools will suit your agency in 2019.

Immediately upon getting his job, my friend told me that he's going to be a project manager. All I was thinking was how I don't have a clue what project management is. After discovering what it consists of, I was shocked at how complicated a life of the project manager can be without the precious tools at their disposal. Fortunately, there are a few that can make your life a bit more comfortable.

If we would have to choose only one project management tool out of the bunch, it would definitely be Asana. It's a simple software that keeps your team on track by organizing the projects while focusing on their objectives.

The newest option, called Portfolios, monitors each project in real time. The feature allows for easier reporting and future planning. What's more, Asana provides ready-made templates like Company Goals and Event Planning for the whole team so you can run the projects effortlessly.

Another excellent project and task management tool is Teamwork. The 3-option software consists of Teamwork Projects, Teamwork Desk and Teamwork Chat.

The first one offers milestones and task tracking along with the summary report in the software management program. Teamwork Desk, on the other hand, is a customer interaction software, where you deal with the customer queries. Lastly, the Teamwork Chat is an alternative to the regular means of communication and provides instant messaging for your team. Plus, it integrates with the Projects.

In case your team needs a better workflow and data visualization, Podio will take care of it. This client-team integration software with a simple interface serves as a project collaboration tool for agencies.

Some of the biggest advantages of using Podio are automated workflows, personal dashboards, full workflow customization and unlimited storage to keep all of your projects safe in one place.

How famous is my brand? Where can I schedule posts for each of my 10 profiles? What social media campaign should I make next? Everything about managing social media and more in the paragraphs down below.

When your team needs to create and organize the posts for social media, there's an all-in-one solution. Except for an efficient use, Kontentino will manage multiple business profiles in one calendar, offer a live post preview, and plan boosting of your company's Facebook posts in advance. It's a management and cooperation tool for every agency.

The greatest feature of the software is the possibility of client approvals for the scheduled posts. If your team is super-creative and comes up with plenty of ideas, Kontentino will save them for later. Furthermore, the smart tool allows for an inventive collaboration with its workflow approval and an overview dashboard. Naturally, you can request an insight into your page's performance in a form of a report, too.

Another social media tool ideal for agencies is Falcon.io. The software manages social media content with one calendar and tracks the performance across multiple social media profiles.

It helps you create, schedule and publish the posts, as well as build social media campaigns. You can choose to monitor social media and custom searches in real time. The system has permission levels and user roles which you can assign to any team member.

Fast forward to the social media tools and we arrived at Brand24. Brand24 is a web and social media monitoring tool. It collects in real time all publicly available mentions of predefined keywords from social media, news sites, blogs, websites, discussion forums and other sources. It's a solid and affordable tool to help you monitor and manage online reputation, track and assess marketing campaigns, track your competitors, get customer feedback, do social selling and more.

To help you make sense out of your online presence, Brand24 provides you with plenty of useful data, including sentiment analysis, social media reach, trending hashtags, locations, most influential sources mentioning your keywords.

StoryChief is great c ontent marketing tool that helps you plan, schedule and distribute your content creations through various channels at once. It helps you to create quality content andmake sure that this content is being actually seen by yourpotential customers. Therefore, it distributes the information through all media and websites and helps you to become a tough leader in your sector.

The program has an approval option for agencies and measures the ROI of the content you publish. Additionally, StoryChief provides a blog solution similar to WordPress but with no technical barriers.

Boosterberg is an automation tool that manages your posts through paid promotion. It checks the posts on business pages and creates the ads for your posts automatically.

In case of bad ad performance, Boosterberg will turn the ads off. The registration process takes place via Facebook. Once registered, the whole team can use one account for every business Facebook page and ad account.

Indahash is an influencer marketing platform that connects brand names with social media influencers. After downloading the app, the influencers have to do choose a campaign and publish a photo or a video with a tag.

The app may depend on the number of influencers who chose your company. However, introducing them to the software could bring you the visibility you needed.

You can entrust the last group to the designers, as they will have the most benefit from it. Let's dig into which design tools your agency can use.

Crello is a graphic design software that you can use to create instant visuals for social media, web and marketing. Use hundreds of templates in 40 formats (including video formats like Facebook Video Cover, Instagram Video Story and more) to make posts and ads without any design knowledge and in mere minutes.

With Crello, you won't have to worry about having a visual to go with your blank link when posting on social or scramble to pick the right font for your next giveaway post on Instagram. Use the handy Resize tool to quickly duplicate your design in several formats.

Is your graphic design tool that helps you to find fresh inspiration instantly and to create attractive images easily. Moreover RelayThat gives you a hand with all painful resizing and editing because it manages to do it all in one. It is a total life saver when your designer is not around!

For those that hated art classes as kids but have to create visual content, Canva is the necessary tool. Its simple interface gives you an almost unlimited amount of graphics, symbols, photographs and fonts you can use in your projects.

Canva is the right free tool for all of your infographics and professional designs. The premium version will uncover more options if you're in need of particularly-tailored design.

Invision, a digital product design platform and a collaboration tool. It offers your team to create interactive mockups which you can share live with the viewers and their feedback in real time.

The software will lead you through the entire design workflow. The designers and other team members can work together on a project with the help of a digital whiteboard.

The last and not the least digital tool for agencies is Unbounce. This useful landing page builder is much more than the name says.

Your team will not only create landing pages but popups which trigger the right customers at the right time, as well as sticky bars, a mobile-friendly design feature that boosts the conversions.

Your SEO expert team is certainly already using all of the following tools, however, here's the short list in case you forgot any of them.

If you're keen to check out the competitors, SEMrush would be the go-to tool. The program can help you make analytics reports with all kinds of data.

You can use the free version with limited data, while the paid option will show competitor's keywords, display ads and budget, organic competitors, as well as their product listing ads. Moreover, SEMrush will conduct a thorough link analysis and let you know what keywords you have to use in your SEO and PPC campaigns.

Not yet convinced? Well, better be, because even online retail giants such as eBay use it.

One of the best tools for SEO is definitely Moz. It consists of Moz Pro and Moz Local. Moz Pro is a toolset that will check your website's links, do the keyword research, make SEO audits and discover page optimization insights.

Moz Local are business listings for your company. In plain English, it's the software that prevents wrong information about your business appearing online. It connects customers with your business.

The last digital tool for SEO from the list is probably the oldest one. Don't let its name, Screaming Frog SEO Spider frighten you. The program will crawl URL's like Google does and later on identify the technical issues on your site.

In case you think there are duplicate content issues or broken link pages (404s) on your site, the SEO Spider will detect them and let you export them in a file. The files can then be sent to developers, UX designers, content creators or anyone else in charge of fixing these problems.

Communication can be the biggest issue that stops the natural flow in the project's lifespan. Still, you can choose between a variety of programs that will connect team members and let them communicate more clearly.

Slack is a software where work happens , according to the company. It's a communication tool for agencies comprised of channels which you organise by the team, by project or by topics.

These channels are perfect for the teams that put an emphasis on communication since they provide a couple of options. The members can chat via instant messaging or in special groups. What's more, the program allows for a fast document search within the app where all your documents are stored.

Faster than Skype and more convenient than standard video conference rooms, Appear.in is a video collaboration program where teams can have meetings when they need to. It offers conversations with up to 12 people (in the PRO plan) and the members can join from any device.

Appear.in has a considerable video quality and takes the word "private" on a whole new level. You can lock the room and screen guests while they knock. The most helpful option is joining the room via a link, without needing to register ahead.

After going through the types of the tools, here are two more that might help in the everyday life of an agency. The first one is for those who need fast and efficient scheduling for meetings. The other one is for those who like their grammar as they like their work - immaculate.

Calendly is a scheduling tool to keep all your future meetings in one place. Calendly can integrate with your calendar to avoid double booking.

It also detects time zones of the invitees. That way everyone can come to a meeting at the right time. Additionally, you can create secret events and combine with the apps like Salesforce.

Grammarly is one of the best tools in this list. Everyone should use it. The platform is essentially your automated writing assistant. It corrects the grammar of the text you enter into the program.

Although it's recommended to use the premium version with more features, the free version works just as well and only tells you what kind of errors you had in the piece instead of correcting them all. The awesome thing about it is that you can integrate it into your browser or use it with a team in the business plan.

When I finally enlisted all of the additional hands that can simplify your work, it's up to you to choose which of those your agency requires.

Only then you can think about how to make the most of the digital tools to engage your future customers.
Article by: Lea Kuscer

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Top 20 Digital Tools for Agencies in 2019

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Have you ever felt like the most overworked person in your team? We all did. The main reason for your suffering was avoiding to use digital tools for agencies or using the wrong tools. Before going into detail, let me first tell you a short story.

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18 GOLDEN ADVERTISING RULES BY LEGENDARY D. OGILVY AND R. REEVES

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18 GOLDEN ADVERTISING RULES BY LEGENDARY D. OGILVY AND R. REEVES

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“The advertisement may have said five, ten, or fifteen things, but the consumer will tend to pick out just one, or else, in a fumbling, confused way, he tries to fuse them together into a concept of his own.”

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"When I write an advertisement, I don't want you to find it 'creative.' I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product."
Those are the words of advertising legend David Ogilvy, right out of his book Ogilvy on Advertising first published in 1985.

Lately, I've been spending some time on reading the advertising classics and discovered that what the agency gurus told 40 or 50 years ago is still relevant today. Even more so, it seems like many modern marketers have forgotten some of the core principles of great advertising.
According to R. Reeves, out of 78 biggest package-goods advertisers in the US, some ads were recalled by 78% of people while others by a mere 2%.
If your advertising fails to get the message to the heads of people, your money's wasted. And this is happening to millions of advertisers every day.

Having worked through two cult marketing books - Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy and Reality in Advertising by Rosser Reeves, I feel like I've been to the best marketing conference of my life - there are so many applicable takeaways.

All the best practices, research findings, and recommendations by the two advertising legends are still relevant today. Even more so, many marketers seem to have forgotten the core principles of marketing.

Just take a look at these 18 golden rules of advertising and remind yourself how to create ads that do not fail.

1. You need to know your USP

USP, a term coined by Rosser Reeves, signifies the Unique Selling Proposition. Both Ogilvy and Reeves believed that having a strong USP is the key to successful advertising.
According to Ogilvy, writing a good advertisement starts by studying the product - you need to know what makes it beneficial to its users and different from the competition.
Reeves explained that your USP has three parts:

1. Each advertisement must make a proposition to the consumer.
Not just words, not just product puffery, not just show-window advertising. Each advertisement must say to each reader: "Buy this product, and you will get this specific benefit.

2. The proposition must be one that the competition either cannot, or does not, offer.
It must be unique - either a uniqueness of the brand or a claim not otherwise made in that particular field of advertising.

3. The proposition must be so strong that it can move the mass of millions.
Your advertisements should pull over a large number of new customers to your product.

For example, the ad above proposes a clear value offer: Save money by shopping at Sears.

So how can you find the best USP?

2. Research your product and users

The way Ogilvy came up with the advertising copy for Sears was by researching what people thought about the company.
When research reported that the average shopper thought Sears Roebuck made a profit of 37 per cent on sales, Ogilvy headlined an advertisement Sears makes a profit of 5 per cent.
This specific number was more persuasive than saying that Sears' profit was "less than you might suppose" or something equally vague. Sometimes, it's worth mentioning specifics.

With all the modern surveying tools, asking for your users' feedback is easier than ever before. Use that opportunity to learn what makes people buy your product.

3. If you don't have a strong USP, do this
Most advertisements have interchangeable parts - you could just as well insert a competitor's name in your ads.
This means that you don't have a USP that's limited to only your product.

If that's the case, Reeves suggested two solutions:

1. The product could be changed/improved to have a USP.

2. If the product can't be changed, it's possible to tell the public something about that product that has never been revealed before.

Here's one of the advertisements that Ogilvy created for the Campbell's - it's showing the product from a completely new side.
Do not forget that your Unique Selling Proposition has to be relevant to the audience.
Sometimes, a cool product feature that seems amazing to you does not appeal to your customers.

You could argue that Ogilvy's ad is focused on an irrelevant USP. However, if you give it some more thought, the USP is not that the soup can be served cold. The core USP of the advertisement is that the product's easy to consume - and that's relevant to millions of consumers.

4. Your advertisement needs one big idea
I recommend that you read the following quote at least twice."Be cautious, in the course of adding secondary claims, that a distraction claim does not suddenly crystallize, i.e. a second claim which sucks power away from your USP."- R. Reeves
A consumer tends to remember just one thing from an advertisement - one strong claim, or one strong concept.

If you're advertising more than one benefit, chances are that people don't either remember any of them or develop their own reaction.
As Reeves put it:"The advertisement may have said five, ten, or fifteen things, but the consumer will tend to pick out just one, or else, in a fumbling, confused way, he tries to fuse them together into a concept of his own."
So instead of listing three or more product benefits, find the one that truly matters to people and advertise the hell out of it.

5. How to recognize a strong USP?

How to tell a strong USP from a week one?
For one, a strong USP will sell your product times more than any irrelevant message.
Ogilvy also suggested that your advertisement has to contain a big idea. Ask yourself:

Did it make me gasp when I first saw it?

Do I wish I had thought of it myself?

Is it unique?

Does it fit the strategy to perfection?

Could it be used for 30 years?

For example, the legendary Lucky Strike ads used USP "It's toasted" - and used it in consecutive campaigns for many years.

However, don't focus on minuscule differences. Reever called this "The Deceptive Differential."

Another interesting fact about "It's toasted" message is that back then, Lucky Strike wasn't nearly the only cigarette company selling toasted tobacco.

Which leads us to the next point...

6. You can "acquire" any general USP

According to R. Reeves, the advertiser to first use a Unique Selling Proposition will own that USP.
"Can those USPs be stolen by competitors? - No. Studies of great numbers of brand histories show that the first big advertiser can pre-empt the USP. He is the pioneer, and, protected by his penetration bulwark. Thus, the USP becomes his property."R. Reeves
Lucky Strike owned a general USP. And so did Colgate with their ads saying "Cleans your breath while it cleans your teeth."

Some time later, one of Colgate's competitors ran an advertising with the message "Freshens your breath while it cleans your teeth - because it has a special mouthwash built in!"

Here's what happened:

Now may also be a good time to reflect on your advertising messages and think whether they truly belong to your brand or you're just repeating your competitors' USP.

7. If you find a USP that works, keep repeating it
If you're lucky enough to write a good advertisement, repeat it until it stops selling. According to Reeves, research shows that the readership of an advertisement does not decline when it is run several times in the same magazine.
Readership remains at the same level throughout at least four repetitions. "You aren't advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade."

In fact, changing your USP too often can have a damaging effect on your brand recognition and sales.

Take a look at the case study below.
Look at this way: You shouldn't change your USP while it's working, but this doesn't mean that you can't change your advertisements.
You can create different ads, both in design and copy, until they all reinforce your core USP.

8. Your competitors using a consistent USP will outgrow you
According to Reeves, three great basic principles of advertising reality emerged from their research:

1. Changing a story has the same effect as stopping the money, as far as penetration is concerned.

2. Thus, if you ran a brilliant campaign every year, but change it every year, your competitor can pass you with a campaign that is less brilliant - providing he does not change his copy.

3. Unless a product becomes outmoded, a great campaign will not wear itself off.

"Recently, we watched the drama of an advertiser who had 65% penetration on a powerful, sales-winning theme. Then he changed campaigns. In eighteen months his hard-won 65% penetration had dropped to 2.2% - in other words, had almost vanished entirely."
R. Reeves
If the campaign has really worn itself out, one of two things will happen:

People's awareness of your USP will drop.

The public would cease to respond to the message, and your sales volumes will fall.

Often, when a new brand with a strong USP enters the market, leading competitors panic and start changing their own campaigns. That's the worst idea.

9. There's only so much room in people's heads

Or, if you wish, there's only so much love in people's hearts for brands in the same vertical.
Reeves' research team found that as your branded message becomes increasingly known, the USPs of your competitors fade from people's minds.
"There is a finite limit to what a consumer can remember about 30,000 advertised brands," Reeves said. Today, there are hundreds of thousands of brands advertising.
"It's as if he [the consumer] carries a small box in his head for a given product category. This box is limited either by his inability to remember or his lack of interest."
- R. Reeves According to Ogilvy, the easiest way to get new clients is to do good advertising.
10. Ogilvy on creating great advertisements

Easier said than done.

Here are some key takeaways from Ogilvy's research into what makes some advertisements succeed while others fail.

Images of finished dishes consistently attracted more readers than photographs of the raw ingredients. In a study of 70 campaigns whose sales results were known, Gallup did not find a single before-and-after campaign that didn't increase sales.

Images with an element of "story appeal" were far above average in attracting attention.

The kind of photographs that work hardest are those which arouse the reader's curiosity.

Create ads that people can relate to. When you show a photograph of a woman, men will ignore your ad.

Most copywriters believe that markdowns and special offers are boring, but customers don't think so. They are above average in recall.

READ MORE: 12 Hidden Facebook Features 95% of Marketers Don't Know
One of the golden rules of advertisement design is: Don't capitalize your headlines.
11. Make your ads effortlessly readable

If you look at the ads in the magazine next to you, you'll be surprised how many marketers mistake against this rule.
Here's another important rule: Don't put a period at the end of headlines - they'll stop the reader from reading more. Don't set your copy in reverse type - with white letters on a black background. It's more difficult to read.
A professor at Stanford established that capitals retard reading - capitalized words tend to be read letter by letter.

Black type on a white background is easier to read than copy set in reverse type. So think twice before you set your ad copy on a colourful background.

12. Make your product the hero of your advertising
According to Reeves, "One wrong picture can steal a hundred words."Here's a best practice that applies to all types of advertisements: Make sure your message and visuals match. If the message says: "This tablet dissolves into 10,000 tiny bubbles," show the tablet dissolving into 10,000 tiny bubbles. Make sure your videos interpret your USP. Do not create ads that steal the attention from your USP.
Often, advertisers make the mistake of creating a vampire video - a video that takes away attention from your USP.

Here's another interesting takeaway from Ogilvy: Advertisements with testimonials by celebrities tend to underperform.
Here's another important thing to keep in mind: Do not advertise your competitor's USP, not to spean of their brand names.
Viewers will know the celebrity has been bought and they will remember the celebrity instead of the product advertised.

If there's a comparison with the competitor, they do not mention their name, but say "another leading detergent," etc.
A Harvard professor used to begin his series of lectures with a sentence that took his students by the throat: "Cesare Borgia murdered his brother-in-law for the love of his sister, who was the mistress of their father - the Pope."- A passage from Ogilvy's book On average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy.
13. Headline is the most important part of your ad

Unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90% of your money. The headlines that work best are the ones that promise the reader a benefit.

If you have any news to tell, don't hide it in the body copy. Say it in the headline.

Include your brand name in the headline - otherwise, 80 per cent of people who won't read your body copy will never know what product you're advertising.

According to Ogilvy, some copywriters write "tricky" headlines - double meanings, puns, etc. This is counter-productive. Your headline should telegraph what you want to say.

Moreover, your ad copy should be written in the language people use in everyday conversation. Avoid analogies as they are often misunderstood.
Ogilvy's research showed that readers first look at the illustration, then at the headline, then at the copy.
14. Use the right advertisement layout
On average, headlines below the illustration are read by 10 per cent more people than headlines above the illustration. Here's another interesting takeaway from Reeves: Two-spread magazine ads cost twice as much as single pages, but seldom get twice the readership, or pull twice as many coupons.
So put these elements in that order - illustration at the top, followed by bu the headline.

You could double the reach or frequency of your campaigns by using single-page ads. So think twice before creating two-spread magazine ads.

15. How to create video ads that sell

In his book, Ogilvy has devoted an entire chapter to video advertisements.

Here are the key takeaways from his years of practice and research:

When doing video ads, mention your product multiple times to make people remember it.

Show the packaging and the product. Commercials which end by showing the package are more effective in changing brand preference than commercials which don't.

Try to grab the viewer's attention during the first seconds of your ad.

Research shows that it's more difficult to hold your audience if you use voiceover. It is better to have the actors talk on camera.

16. How to succeed in B2B advertising

If you're in the B2B marketing space, you'll love the following guidelines:

Promise what is important to the customer - a supplier of computer software was proud of the size of his company and wanted to make it the feature of his advertising, but research found that his customers were not interested in size. They were looking for responsiveness, support, service - and a good product.

Make your promise specific. Instead of generalities, use percentages, time elapsed, dollars saved.

Testimonials work well, as long as they come from experts in reputable companies.

Even if you think your product boring, it's not boring to your potential buyers - there's no need to advertise irrelevant images.

Don't be afraid of long copy - if that's what it takes to explain your product.

Fun fact: Ogilvy was running content marketing ads to get new customers. 60 years ago!!

17. How to advertise like TOP consumer brands

Here are Ogilvy's key takeaways from analyzing big advertisers' campaigns, e.g. Procter & Gamble.

There's a lot you can learn from them.

They always promise the consumer one important benefit.

They believe that the first duty of advertising is to communicate effectively, not to be original or entertaining.

They measure communication in three stages: before the copy is written, after the commercials are produced, and in test markets.

All their commercials include a "moment of confirmation." E.g. a demonstration how a cleaning product absorbs more liquid.

Their commercials talk straight to the consumer, using language and situations that are familiar to them.

Often, they also show their users some emotional benefit derived from the product - "You'll be more appreciated if you use Dash."

Is it better to reach a smaller audience, yet reach it more times? Or is it better to reach a bigger audience - yet reach it less often?
18. How to reach the largest audience for your budget?
Reach your audience less often, but make it as large an audience as you can. (This is especially relevant for consumer products that have a wide potential user base.)
Here's Reeves' answer - buy dispersion. Try to reach more homes, not the same homes.

This also applies to digital advertising - e.g. try to reach a wider audience with your Facebook ads rather than show the same ad to the same people for more than 3 times.

Final takeaways

Here are five more amazing quotes from Ogilvy and Reeves that you should remember whenever creating new advertisements.

Don't create ads that are window dressers - the ads that merely show your product without the USP. - R. Reeves

If the product does not meet some existing desire or need of the consumer, the advertising will ultimately fail. - R. Reeves

If it doesn't sell, it's not "creative. - D.Ogilvy

The most dangerous word in advertising is... originality. - R. Reeves

Advertising is the art of getting a unique selling proposition into the heads of the most people at the lowest possible cost. - R. Reeves

- - - - - - -

Ogilvy's book was first published in 1983 and Reeves' even sooner, in 1961. It is amazing how the best practices in use back then have made their way into modern advertising.

Everything you read in this article can be applied to your Facebook advertising campaigns, Instagram ads or email marketing funnels. So take one hour and go over all your current advertisements, looking if they have a clear USP and whether they follow the basic best practices.

You might be surprised by your findings.

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18 Golden Advertising Rules by Legendary D. Ogilvy and R. Reeves - Karola Karlson's blog

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"When I write an advertisement, I don't want you to find it 'creative.' I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product." Those are the words of advertising legend David Ogilvy, right out of his book Ogilvy on Advertising first published in 1985.

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Er is een duidelijke trend waarneembaar op het gebied van performance based werken in de online marketing. Waar vroeger nog op basis van kliks werd afgerekend, gaat dit in toenemende mate op basis van sales of leads. Deze trend is al langer gaande, maar lijkt dankzij de kredietcrisis aan kracht gewonnen te hebben.

Het nieuwe afrekenmodel lijkt erg voordelig voor met name de adverteerder die helemaal of grotendeels alleen betaalt wanneer er voor hem ook daadwerkelijk waarde wordt gecreëerd. Het is echter goed te bedenken dat er heel wat haken en ogen aan een performance based afrekenmodel zitten. Vaak wordt er bijvoorbeeld geen rekening gehouden met het feit dat performance based afspraken ook nadelig kunnen zijn voor het resultaat.

Beide partijen moeten profijt hebben van samenwerking

De doelstelling van het afrekenmodel moet zijn dat beide partijen profijt hebben van de samenwerking als deze succesvol is. Het afrekenmodel moet prikkels bevatten richting het bureau om alles uit de kast te trekken. Wanneer er bovengemiddeld gepresteerd wordt, wil het bureau bovengemiddeld beloond worden. Hierdoor wordt het uitgedaagd om initiatief te nemen en proactief te handelen om een zo goed mogelijk resultaat te behalen. Het omgekeerde moet ook het geval zijn: als een bureau beneden niveau presteert, gaat dit ten koste van de beloning.

Een ideaal model kenmerkt zich doordat beide partijen (bureau en adverteerder) dezelfde doelstelling voor ogen hebben. Dit kan zijn een bepaalde CPO (Cost per Order) of een bepaald aantal orders. Als de doelstellingen voor de partijen verschillen, ontstaat er de mogelijkheid dat een van beide partijen aan het kortste eind trekt. Dat biedt uiteraard geen goede basis voor een lange vruchtbare samenwerking.

Het belang van de adverteerder

In de praktijk is het makkelijker gezegd dan gedaan om goede afspraken te maken op performance based basis. Het is namelijk vaak niet verstandig om simpelweg per order of lead af te rekenen. De prijs per order is maar een deel van wat de adverteerder voor ogen heeft. Hij wil natuurlijk orders en dan het liefst orders die veel marge opleveren.

Een adverteerder wil echter ook véél orders. Dit laatste belang wordt niet behartigd wanneer er alleen gekeken wordt naar de CPO. In dat geval kan het bureau het eigen belang boven dat van de adverteerder stellen. Het bureau kan er namelijk voor kiezen zich te richten op de laaghangende vruchten, de conversies die bij wijze van spreken komen aanwaaien.

Eerste conversies het winstgevendst

In veel gevallen zijn de eerste conversies relatief makkelijk te realiseren. Deze orders of leads zijn daardoor goedkoop voor het bureau en leveren een hoge marge op. Hoe meer een bureau uit de markt wil halen, hoe meer moeite, tijd en dus geld dit zal kosten. Dit zorgt ervoor dat de marge van het bureau slinkt naarmate de online marketingcampagnes worden uitgebreid. De campagnes kunnen zelfs verliesgevend zijn voor het bureau.

Er bestaat dus spanning tussen de belangen van de adverteerder en die van het bureau. De laatste zal geneigd zijn werkzaamheden te beperken tot het binnenhalen van de goedkopere conversies, terwijl de adverteerder van het bureau verwacht het onderste uit de kan te halen.

Mogelijke oplossingen

Gelukkig zijn er manieren om deze spanning te verlichten of geheel weg te nemen. Hieronder bespreek ik een aantal mogelijkheden.

Additionele afspraken

Bij deze optie komt het er eigenlijk op neer dat het contract verder wordt dichtgetimmerd. In veel gevallen kan de afspraak niet beperkt worden tot het toevoegen van een minimum aantal orders. Je moet ook afspraken maken over de omzet en hoeveel welke order waard is. Het is echter maar de vraag of er een waterdicht contract denkbaar is. Het is ook de vraag of je wil vertrouwen op een contract om het onderlinge belangenverschil op te lossen. Uiteindelijk is het de bedoeling het bureau te motiveren tot het behalen van de beste prestaties, niet om het bureau juridisch klem te zetten.

Staffels

Een manier om het bureau te blijven motiveren om alles uit de kast te trekken is het gebruik van staffels. Door ervoor te zorgen dat het binnenhalen van orders het bureau steeds meer oplevert, blijft de motivatie om extra moeite te doen. Dit model wordt al langer gebruikt in de affiliate marketing en daagt de publishers uit extra initiatief te tonen om in een hogere staffel terecht te komen. Het is van groot belang de staffels goed aan te laten sluiten bij de werkelijkheid om een balans te vinden tussen het motiveren van het bureau en het behouden van marge. Omdat het niet duidelijk is wat de toekomst gaat brengen, blijft er altijd een grote kans dat een van beide partijen aan het kortste eind trekt.

Basisvergoeding + bonus

Het laatste model dat ik hier bespreek, is niet in zijn geheel performance based. Het gaat uit van een lage basisvergoeding met daarbij de mogelijkheid voor het bureau om een aanvullende vergoeding te verdienen. De kracht van dit model is dat het beperkte financiële risico het bureau meer ruimte geeft om juist risico te nemen. Wanneer het gehele risico bij het bureau komt te liggen, kan dit verlammend werken. Doordat er meer op het spel staat, heeft het bureau ook meer te verliezen, wat het bureau kan doen besluiten behoudend te werk te gaan. Dit is voor de adverteerder niet wenselijk als deze bijvoorbeeld aanzienlijk willen groeien. Door het risico van het bureau te beperken, ontstaat er voor het bureau meer ruimte om bijvoorbeeld een groter deel van de markt te veroveren.

Het beperken van het risico is natuurlijk ook direct de zwakte van deze manier van werken. Het bureau kan genoegen nemen met de lage basisvergoeding en weinig inspanning leveren om in aanmerking te komen voor een bonus. Wanneer het verdienmodel goed is uitgewerkt, zal het bureau echter gemotiveerd blijven om hard te werken omdat het ook zelf afhankelijk is van het resultaat. Dit model wordt al lange tijd op veel plaatsen met succes toegepast. Deze manier van werken verliest echter in populariteit, omdat het compleet performance based werken voordeliger lijkt te zijn voor de adverteerder.

Andere modellen

Er zijn nog veel andere varianten denkbaar die elementen uit de bovenstaande modellen combineren. Dat is ook noodzakelijk omdat elke situatie weer anders is.

Mediabudget integreren is niet reëel

In de bovenstaande modellen is het mediabudget niet besproken als onderdeel van de afspraken. Wanneer er compleet performance based wordt gewerkt, is ook het mediabudget, bijvoorbeeld de kosten van Adwords, deel van de afspraken. Het bureau loopt in dat geval niet alleen het risico geen of beperkte vergoeding voor geleverde diensten te krijgen, maar ook om op te draaien voor andere kosten.

Het is niet reëel om het bureau al het risico te laten dragen. Zoals ik hierna nog bespreek, zijn er veel factoren van invloed op het resultaat van de campagnes. Veel daarvan liggen niet binnen de invloedssfeer van het bureau. Is het dan wel eerlijk het bureau hier in zijn geheel verantwoordelijk voor te maken? Het bureau wordt dan gebruikt als een soort investeerder of verzekeraar. Als de resultaten buiten de schuld van het bureau tegenvallen, is het bureau zijn investering kwijt. Dit kan het einde betekenen voor een verder goede samenwerking.

Performance based model is hard werken

Het performance based model suggereert dat het bureau verantwoordelijk is en kan zijn voor een goed resultaat. Het wekt de indruk dat het in grotere mate zelfstandig naar een goed resultaat kan toewerken. De adverteerder is zich echter vaak niet bewust dat dit afrekenmodel ook meer van de hemzelf vraagt. Het bureau is immers voor veel zaken afhankelijk van de adverteerder. Wanneer er meer van het bureau wordt verwacht, zal deze op haar beurt ook meer verwachten van de adverteerder. Een optimaal resultaat behalen, vergt een optimale samenwerking en het uiterste van beide partijen. De adverteerder kan dus allerminst achterover leunen om te zien hoe het bureau de klus klaart.

Het blijft voor een deel koffiedik kijken

Uiteindelijk is de essentie van bovenstaande modellen om onzekerheid over de intenties van de gekozen partner te beperken. De onzekerheid over de kwaliteit van het bureau waarmee samengewerkt wordt, is echter maar een klein deel van de onzekerheid. Zo zal de recente financiële crisis voor veel spanning hebben gezorgd tussen adverteerder en bureau. Omzetten dalen hoewel er bijvoorbeeld met het bureau is afgesproken de omzet met 10% te laten stijgen. In dit geval schiet het bureau er flink bij in.

Hoe goed het contract ook is, er bestaat altijd de mogelijkheid dat een van de partijen er bekaaid van afkomt. Naast de ontwikkelingen van de algehele economie zijn er nog veel meer factoren die van invloed zijn op het succes van de campagnes. Denk hierbij aan de kracht van de concurrentie, het ontstaan van substituten, het weer en de mode.

Vaststellen van doelstelling

Het vaststellen van uitdagende doch haalbare targets is cruciaal voor een goede overeenkomst en dus samenwerking. Wanneer dit niet het geval is, ontstaat er verschil tussen het belang van de adverteerder en dat van het bureau. Komen tot goede doelstellingen en staffels is echter makkelijker gezegd dan gedaan. Hoe kom je tot deze afspraken? Je kunt je hierbij natuurlijk baseren op het verleden, als dat er is. Bureaus worden tegenwoordig direct aan het begin van de samenwerking gevraagd om performance based te werken. In die situatie is er vaak maar weinig in het verleden waar de doelstelling op gebaseerd kan worden.

Wanneer de adverteerder haar webanalytics op orde heeft is dit alvast een goed begin. Hierdoor kunnen er op basis van het verleden uitspraken gedaan worden over de mogelijkheden in de toekomst. Maar zoals al eerder gezegd kan de toekomst er heel anders uitzien. Ook zeggen resultaten uit het verleden meer over de onlinemarketingkwaliteiten van het voormalige bureau dan over de kwaliteiten van het bureau waarmee de adverteerder nu in zee gaat.

Al met al zal de doelstelling vastgelegd in een contract in veel gevallen tekort schieten. En zal het contract daardoor vaak onevenredig in het voordeel van een van de partijen zijn met de gevolgen die hierboven al zijn beschreven. Het kan verstandig zijn om daarom niet direct van start te gaan met een performance based contract, maar eerst de samenwerking een kans te geven met behulp van een ander afrekenmodel.

Looptijd contract is belangrijk

Naast de afspraken die gemaakt moeten worden over de te behalen prestatie en welke vergoeding daar tegenover staat, is ook de looptijd van het contract erg belangrijk. Online marketingcampagnes hebben vaak tijd nodig om op stoom te komen. Deze tijd moet het bureau ook krijgen. Doordat online marketing zo goed meetbaar is, wordt na verloop van tijd duidelijk wat wel en niet werkt. Met deze informatie kunnen de campagnes vaak sterk verbeterd worden. Dit is een doorgaand proces met het doel om de resultaten continu te verbeteren. De meetbaarheid van het online kanaal biedt ook veel mogelijkheden om nieuwe ideeën te testen. Ook hier is tijd voor nodig. Bij het bepalen van de looptijd dient hier rekening mee gehouden te worden.

Escape inbouwen

Ook kan het goed zijn om voor beide partijen een escape in te bouwen. Op die manier kan de samenwerking die niet werkt voor een van de partijen onder bepaalde voorwaarden verbroken worden. Ook kan er in een dergelijke situatie heronderhandeld worden over de voorwaarden van het contract. Er kan bijvoorbeeld afgesproken worden dat beide partijen het recht hebben een contract op te zeggen wanneer de resultaten onder een bepaald niveau blijven. Als de targets goed zijn vastgesteld, zal dit ook in het belang zijn van beide partijen.

Partnerselectie: kwaliteit voorop

Uiteindelijk wil je niet per se in zee gaan met de partij die het beste contract voorlegt. Het contract is niet het doel, maar een middel om te komen tot een goede samenwerking. Wanneer je samenwerkt met een bureau dat incompetent is voor het werk waar ze voor worden ingehuurd, heb je ook niets aan het contract. De belangrijkste reden om voor een bureau te kiezen moet natuurlijk de kwaliteit van de verleende diensten blijven. De kosten van online marketing zijn niet het enige risico en vaak ook niet het grootste risico dat wordt genomen bij de samenwerking met een bureau.

Voor veel adverteerders zal de omzet die potentieel gemist wordt doordat een bureau tekortschiet veel zwaarder wegen dan de kosten die bespaard kunnen worden. Het risico nemen omzet mis te lopen om kosten te besparen, is vaak niet verstandig. Ook hier moet weer een balans gezocht worden tussen de kwaliteit van het bureau en de prijs die betaald wordt.

Relatie cruciaal

Zoals ik al een paar keer eerder heb benoemd, is het niet mogelijk om de toekomst te vangen in een contract. Gelukkig leven we dan ook niet in een wereld waar er alleen opportunistisch gehandeld wordt en iedereen alleen gericht is op het eigen belang. De tekortkomingen van een contract hoeven niet tot problemen te leiden in een samenwerking waar beide partijen gericht zijn op een rechtvaardige uitkomst. Vertrouwen dat gebaseerd is op een contract, is erg zwak. Uiteindelijk zal het doel zijn om op de lange termijn baat te hebben bij een samenwerking. Dat is alleen mogelijk wanneer beide partijen flexibel zijn en kunnen vertrouwen op de medewerking van de ander.

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Performance based afrekenmodel: kansen en bedreigingen - Frankwatching

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Er is een duidelijke trend waarneembaar op het gebied van performance based werken in de online marketing. Waar vroeger nog op basis van kliks werd afgerekend, gaat dit in toenemende mate op basis van sales of leads. Deze trend is al langer gaande, maar lijkt dankzij de kredietcrisis aan kracht gewonnen te hebben.

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Primate powered algorithms that scan your site for common bugs and SEO mistakes.

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Blogging timeout!

Can we all agree that content marketing is getting a bit out of control?

At last count, a Google search of "types of formats of content marketing" yielded upwards of 105 types of content.

That means it's the perfect time to get back to our storytelling roots-blogging.

This isn't to say you have to give up your fancy videos and podcasts and webinars, no. In fact, nobody should be putting their proverbial eggs in just one basket.

TL;DR

1. You'll generate THREE TIMES more leads via blogs than through ads.

2. Blogging is perfect for SEO.

3. You'll have FOUR TIMES the likelihood of being found higher on organic search results.

4. Blogging will make or break your 2018.

5. Blogging is your brand's voice and calling card.

6. You can sleep while your blogs do your work for you.

7. Your blogs are an opportunity for transparency.

8. Blogging pinpoints your WHY and keeps your head in the game.

9. Google likes blogging as a content marketing strategy (it's true).

10. Long-form, short-form, don't care.

11. TL;DR is good for you (and your SEO)

12. Blogging is a great workout for your brain!

13. If you write it, they will share by click or word of mouth...

14. You can start a blog for free!

15. Blogging doesn't get jealous of other types of content.

Now, if you're still asking, "Why do I need blogging to be a part of my content marketing strategy?"

Here are the top 15 reasons why, in more detail...

1. When it comes to lead generation, blogging is better-way better, than paying for ads

If you have an effective content marketing strategy, then the results you get from blogging will far surpass any short-term traffic from temporary search ads.

Yes. You'll generate THREE TIMES more leads via blogs than through ads.

So why break the bank when you can bang on your keyboard and flex those brain cells on the path to content creation?!

2. Blogging drives traffic to your website and is perfect for SEO.

There's even a Content Writing Checklist out there already, designed to help you in your search engine optimized blogging efforts.

3. You'll have FOUR TIMES the likelihood of ranking higher in organic search results than those who don't have a blog (Source: Tech Client).

Microsoft and IBM might have been the first ones to have "the corporate blog" as we know it, but the fact of the matter is, you can't afford NOT to have one today.

4. A whopping 52%of marketers define blogging as "critical"

In a recent content marketing survey of 2,562 marketers worldwide, blogging came out on top as the most critical content marketing tactic for 2018.

Given the fact that there are 105 documented "content marketing tactics" to begin with, blogging coming in at #1 is a true testament to the power of the blog!

5. Blogging is your brand's calling card to building trust

If you've got your finger on the pulse of industry trends and your clients' needs, then you already know that your company blog is the perfect platform to remain true to your brand.

So get those fingers moving.

6. Blogs don't sleep so you can, among other lovely thingson your to-do live

There's a reason why blogs like Hubspot's gets over a million visits through organic search engine results alone.

They've invested in their blogging and powered their way through to a SEO-driven library, and now their blogs are working for them while they sleep.

7. Your blogs are an opportunity for transparency

Among other things, Buffer is known for their transparency and willingness to share best practices. There's no better way to show your company's core values than through honest two-way communication, which blogging affords you from the get-go.

If you're a startup, then get on the path to sharing and starting those conversations early on.

Standuply is a prime example of how humble beginnings and failures along the way.

Mistakes happen, and can help build a community. Just ask Gleb Dvoryatkin, Artem Borodin, and Alex Kistenev (photo: left to right).

Authenticity matters. It matters to prospects and it matters to your existing client base.

8. You're more likely to know WHY you're blogging, because writing actually does require research and planning.

And that why can make or break you.

So do you know why you're blogging? And what the purpose is for each blog?

What is your blog's goal?

Note: No matter the "why," your writing voice should never lose your brand's personality and personal touch.

9. Google awards longer, insightful reads

It's true.

Google decided years ago that longer blogging posts should rank more favorably because of the opportunities for relevant backlinks in evergreen content (serving as your blog's cornerstones).

The reader would have to, in turn, stay on said page longer in order to read the in-depth content, therefore establishing credibility for the site.

It's no wonder that bloggers are increasingly opting for long-form content.

Source: orbitmedia.com | 2017

10. Short-form content works for its own reasons

There are reason why blogs of 500 words or less are still quite effective too:

They're easier on the eye for mobile users

They're more likely to be shared

And FYI, Story Chief stays on top of Google algorithms and recommendations for you so you don't have to. Just create your stories and follow the guidelines along the way. Plus, AMP and Instant Articles are the way to go.

Story Chief will never lead your astray!

11. The emergence of the TL;DR is a hidden SEO bonus

The "TLDR" has been widely adopted as a blogging trick of the trade as of late.

Much like social media, TLDR isn't going away anytime soon. So you might as well embrace it.

Urban legends tell the tale of the origins of the TLDR dating back to as far as 2003, which for modern day tweens are ancient times. The initialism stood for "too long didn't read," and was used by high schoolers as a text message reply indicating that one was far too busy to even justify a response more than "TLDR."

Oh, the travesty.

But all jokes aside, TLDR plays dual roles.

It helps summarize your blog post into succinct one-liners for those people out there who don't always have the time or attention span to read long-form content

It's an opportunity to jam in a few more long-tail keywords for your on-page SEO

12. Blogging is a marathon and not a race

Despite rumors to the contrary, people do read blogs. They always have.

The fruits of your content marketing labor will be be worth it in the long run. Thought leadership takes time. So build up your credibility and be at the top of everyone's mind for in-depth material.

They'll even link back to your content as a credible source.

Inbound links are priceless. As important as it is to include some hyperlinks of your own in your SEO writing, the number of backlinks that your blog receives may be your lifeline to blogging survival.

13. Ambassadors are real people just like you and your readers

There are several ways to extend your reach, including but not limited to:

As Rockin' 1000 Founder Fabio Zaffagnini can attest to, the "thousand" in Rockin' 1000 multiplied and amplified his efforts year after year.

The love of music and people came together and each ambassador made it possible to give a portion of this year's concert's proceeds to charity.

Rockin' 1000 meets Blogging 1000?

Story Chief makes it possible to increase your blog's reach by 14 times with its referral marketing system built right in.

Never underestimate the power of the word of mouth.

14. You can start a blog for free

Yes, whether or not you decide to use the free blog provided by Story Chief, it is still possible in this day and age to blog for free on other platforms.

Level up your inbound marketing game by investing in high quality blogging. Not only will you drive traffic your way but you'll be able to repurpose your content so you're not constantly reinventing the wheel.

15. You can blog all day and still go content marketing crazy by night

Think of all your forms of content as investment strategies, and your library of content as your investment portfolio. Sure, you have to diversify, but be sure to make blogging your primary investment.

You'll definitely get the best return on your investment by investing in blogging!

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Top 15 reasons why your content strategy must include blogging | StoryChief

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Blogging timeout! Can we all agree that content marketing is getting a bit out of control? At last count, a Google search of "types of formats of content marketing" yielded upwards of 105 types of content. That means it's the perfect time to get back to our storytelling roots-blogging.

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Webinar: How to Do Keyword Research in 2019 for Maximum Search Traffic

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Webinar: How to Do Keyword Research in 2019 for Maximum Search Traffic

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Webinar is wel om 20u

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Keyword research isn't just about choosing high volume search terms, building links, and ranking for that single keyword alone. It is the foundation of a good SEO campaign.

Ahrefs studied 3 million random search queries and found that a #1 ranking page will also rank for nearly 1,000 relevant keywords in the top 10 search results.

So how do you rank your pages for more keywords?

Join this sponsored ThinkTank webinar and learn how to find and choose keywords and topics that will produce the most organic search traffic for your website.

You'll learn:

Why search volume doesn't always represent search traffic.

How to find long tail keyword opportunities with high traffic potential.

How to gauge keyword difficulty of a topic.

A data-driven approach to create content for semantic search.

Presented By

Moderated By

Founder, Search Engine Journal

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How to Do Keyword Research in 2019 for Maximum Search Traffic - Search Engine Journal

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Keyword research isn't just about choosing high volume search terms, building links, and ranking for that single keyword alone. It is the foundation of a good SEO campaign. Ahrefs studied 3 million random search queries and found that a #1 ranking page will also rank for nearly 1,000 relevant keywords in the top 10 search results.

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Some business owners can't have enough of these colorful buttons. Others lie sleepless at night trying to select a single call to action to star on their homepage.

Neither approach is good because it's not about a number. There is no definite answer here that will work for every website.

Yet, it is possible to find out how many CTA buttons you should put on your homepage to lure your prospects deeper into your sales funnel, and I'll share it with you in a minute.

But first, let's take one step back and answer this question:

How to decide how many call-to-action buttons to put on any page
"You should always design your pages around one call to action".
If you've heard (and followed) this piece of advice before, I came to tell you to forget it.

Sure, some pages should be designed around one call to action. But some pages definitely shouldn't.

Here's how to tell them apart.

When to use a single call to action*:

If you can fit everything your visitors need to know about your offer to take that action on one page - meaning the chances they will be convinced without having to read other pages are high - go for a single CTA.
Examples:

"Landing pages" aka "lead capturing pages" that present a single offer and prompt the visitors to buy this product, register for that webinar, download this ebook etc. It can be a stand alone page you guide your prospects to from a campaign on social media as well as a page you link from your navigation that is dedicated to your free ebook.

Contact page (because the only thing you want people to do there is to contact you).

A particular service page (because the only thing you want people to do there is to send an inquiry).

A possible example here is also your About page if your offer is straightforward and easy to grasp (for ex., if you're a freelancer). Your single CTA could be "Contact me", "View services", "Download my ebook", "Sign up to my list", etc.

When to use multiple calls to action:

Can't possibly fit all the info your differently motivated visitors need to sign up, buy from you, or hire you? That page of yours needs multiple CTAs.

The obvious examples: Shop page, Services page, Courses page, etc.

A not so obvious example: Your homepage.

Your homepage is a corridor

Your homepage shouldn't be a porch of your house aka website with only one door. It should be more of a corridor that has multiple clearly labeled doors, each of them leading your visitors further inside your house based on their current needs. And unless the vast majority of your visitors come to you with one and the same specific goal** , you need multiple doors.

It certainly shouldn't be every door (aka CTA button) to every possible room (aka page) you have on your website. Your visitors would be overwhelmed with the options and would run out of this crazy house of yours.

But how many doors does your corridor need? Follow these 4 easy steps to decide.

4 steps to help you decide how many CTAs to put on your homepage (and what they should be)

Step 1: Brainstorm the possible CTAs

Write down all possible call to actions you think will make sense on your homepage . Don't focus on the perfect CTA copy and just state what the action should be (for ex., "Check out my About page", "Check out my services", etc.).

You should tell your visitors right there what you do, for whom, and what's the benefit. But beyond that, think about what else your visitors need to know to get from where they are right now...

(for example, wondering if you have a solution to their problem, if you offer the services they need, if they can trust you)

...to the place where they need to be to be ready to open their wallets.

Step 2: Sort CTAs by commitment

Color the CTAs you came up with in Step 1 red, yellow or green based on how difficult you think it will be to persuade your visitors to take that action (i.e. based on the level of commitment).

For example, to buy something from you or to send you an inquiry are actions of high commitment, whereas to click a button to read the latest blog posts is a low commitment action.

Step 3: Sort CTAs by value

Arrange your CTAs from top to bottom based on their value to you. For example, a click to view your services is more valuable than a click to read a blog post.

Obviously, the more valuable an action is to you, the higher commitment it requires from your visitors. But there still can be a difference in the value between the CTAs of the same commitment level.

Step 4: Decide what CTAs to keep

Decide which CTAs to add, which not to add and where to place them on your homepage based on the following rules of thumb:

2 rules of thumbs that help you place your CTAs on your homepage
Rule One:
No more than one CTA button should be visible simultaneously on the screen of your visitors (unless it's products or services CTAs):

❌ "Contact me", "View services"

✔️ "Learn more" (about service one), "Learn more" (about service two)
Rule Two:
The higher is the level of commitment an action requires, the more compelling your copy needs to be.

Your visitors aren't going to hire you because of your pretty eyes. You need to provide enough information (and often social proof) to persuade them to take an action that requires them to spend money or even get on your email list.

This also means that only a few people will click a "Contact me" button placed right after the first sentence on your homepage (and those who do are probably suffering from a compulsory button clicking disorder and have no intention to actually contact you).

And while you are at it...
... make sure not to make these CTA button mistakes.

Here's a possible solution for the homepage in the example above:

What CTAs didn't make it to the homepage and why

From all the call-to-action buttons that were up for consideration, the following got nixed:

❌ Contact me

A legit inquiry is a holy grail for many knowledge-based businesses. But the level of commitment required from your visitors to press that magic button is very high.

As we are talking about your homepage and not a single service page, it would be hard to create compelling copy that guides all the audience segments to this call to action and not blow up the size of the page.

❌ Check out case studies

For the sake of this example, let's say you want to do less one-on-one projects but sell more digital products. This means you'd rather have people sign up to you list (so that you can market your products to them later) or buy directly.

So, you decide not to mention the case studies on the homepage to reduce the number of CTA buttons. Because the fewer the buttons you have, the higher are the changes that an individual button gets clicked, and you'd rather have your visitors focus on your lead magnet and a paid course.

It does make sense to link to the relevant case studies from the separate services pages though. Presented in a specific context to a visitor who's already interested in that service, they are more likely to get attention and impress.

❌ Check out About page

You decide to introduce yourself early on the page so that your visitors can better connect with you and what you're saying. But adding this CTA early on the page will interrupt the conversation and take them to your About page before you get to tell them about your offer.

So, you decide not to tempt people to jump to another page too early. Whoever wants to learn more about you than you tell on the homepage directly can use the navigation menu.

***

You may decide differently on what CTAs to keep because your offer is different. Maybe you don't offer digital products or free ebooks and just want your prospects to send you an inquiry. Then "Contact me" is your friend (just don't put it too early on the page).

Final words of wisdom

Bad news: When it comes to creating a successful website that drives client inquiries and sales, there is almost never a definite answer that works for everyone.

Good news: There is almost always a clear process to help you get to the answer that works best for you, and this article is an example of that.

And when in doubt, you can always ask me to help.

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How Many CTA Buttons to Put On Your Homepage? Use This 4-Step Process to Decide

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Some business owners can't have enough of these colorful buttons. Others lie sleepless at night trying to select a single call to action to star on their homepage. Neither approach is good because it's not about a number. There is no definite answer here that will work for every website.

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It has been another year (and a half) since the last publication of the Local Search Ranking Factors, and local search continues to see significant growth and change. The biggest shift this year is happening in Google My Business signals, but we're also seeing an increase in the importance of reviews and continued decreases in the importance of citations.

Check out the full survey!

Huge growth in Google My Business

Google has been adding features to GMB at an accelerated rate. They see the revenue potential in local, and now that they have properly divorced Google My Business from Google+, they have a clear runway to develop (and monetize) local. Here are just some of the major GMB features that have been released since the publication of the 2017 Local Search Ranking Factors:

Google Posts available to all GMB users

Google Q&A

Website builder

Services

Messaging

Videos

Videos in Google Posts

These features are creating shifts in the importance of factors that are driving local search today. This year has seen the most explosive growth in GMB specific factors in the history of the survey. GMB signals now make up 25% the local pack/finder pie chart.

GMB-specific features like Google Posts, Google Q&A, and image/video uploads are frequently mentioned as ranking drivers in the commentary. Many businesses are not yet investing in these aspects of local search, so these features are currently a competitive advantage. You should get on these before everyone is doing it.

Here's your to do list:

1. Start using Google posts NOW. At least once per week, but preferably a few times per week. Are you already pushing out posts to Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter? Just use the same, lightly edited, content on Google Posts. Also, use calls to action in your posts to drive direct conversions.

2. Seed the Google Q&A with your own questions and answers. Feed that hyper-relevant, semantically rich content to Google. Relevance FTW.

3. Regularly upload photos and videos. (Did you know that you can upload videos to GMB now?)

4. Make sure your profile is 100% complete. If there is an empty field in GMB, fill it. If you haven't logged into your GMB account in a while, you might be surprised to see all the new data points you can add to your listing.

Why spend your time on these activities? Besides the potential relevance boost you'll get from the additional content, you're also sending valuable engagement signals. Regularly logging into your listing and providing content shows Google that you're an active and engaged business owner that cares about your listing, and the local search experts are speculating that this is also providing ranking benefits. There's another engagement angle here too: user engagement. Provide more content for users to engage with and they'll spend more time on your listing clicking around and sending those helpful behavioral signals to Google.

Reviews on the rise

Review signals have also seen continued growth in importance over last year.

Review signals were 10.8% in 2015, so over the past 3 years, we've seen a 43% increase in the importance of review signals:

Many practitioners talked about the benefits they're seeing from investing in reviews. I found David Mihm's comments on reviews particularly noteworthy. When asked "What are some strategies/tactics that are working particularly well for you at the moment?", he responded with:

"In the search results I look at regularly, I continue to see reviews playing a larger and larger role. Much as citations became table stakes over the last couple of years, reviews now appear to be on their way to becoming table stakes as well. In mid-to-large metro areas, even industries where ranking in the 3-pack used to be possible with a handful of reviews or no reviews, now feature businesses with dozens of reviews at a minimum - and many within the last few months, which speaks to the importance of a steady stream of feedback.

Whether the increased ranking is due to review volume, keywords in review content, or the increased clickthrough rate those gold stars yield, I doubt we'll ever know for sure. I just know that for most businesses, it's the area of local SEO I'd invest the most time and effort into getting right -- and done well, should also have a much more important flywheel effect of helping you build a better business, as the guys at have been talking about for years."

Getting keywords in your reviews is a factor that has also risen. In the 2017 survey, this factor ranked #26 in the local pack/finder factors. It is now coming in at #14.

I know this is the Local Search Ranking Factors, and we're talking about what drives rankings, but you know what's better than rankings? Conversions. Yes, reviews will boost your rankings, but reviews are so much more valuable than that because a ton of positive reviews will get people to pick up the phone and call your business, and really, that's the goal. So, if you're not making the most of reviews yet, get on it!

A quick to do list for reviews would be:

1. Work on getting more Google reviews (obviously). Ask every customer.

2. Encourage keywords in the reviews by asking customers to mention the specific service or product in their review.

3. Respond to every review. (Did you know that Google now notifies the reviewer when the owner responds?)

4. Don't only focus on reviews. Actively solicit direct customer feedback as well so you can mark it up in schema/JSON and get stars in the search results.

5. Once you're killing it on Google, diversify and get reviews on the other important review sites for your industry (but also continue to send customers to Google).

For a more in-depth discussion of review strategy, please see the blog post version of my 2018 MozCon presentation, " How to Convert Local Searchers Into Customers with Reviews."

Meh, links

To quote Gyi Tsakalakis: "Meh, links." All other things being equal, links continue to be a key differentiator in local search. It makes sense. Once you have a complete and active GMB listing, your citations squared away, a steady stream of reviews coming in, and solid content on your website, the next step is links. The trouble is, links are hard, but that's also what makes them such a valuable competitive differentiator. They ARE hard, so when you get quality links they can really help to move the needle.

When asked, "What are some strategies/tactics that are working particularly well for you at the moment?" Gyi responded with:

"Meh, links. In other words, topically and locally relevant links continue to work particularly well. Not only do these links tend to improve visibility in both local packs and traditional results, they're also particularly effective for improving targeted traffic, leads, and customers. Find ways to earn links on the sites your local audience uses. These typically include local news, community, and blog sites."

Citations?

Let's make something clear: citations are still very valuable and very important.

Ok, with that out of the way, let's look at what's been happening with citations over the past few surveys:

I think this decline is related to two things:

1. As local search gets more complex, additional signals are being factored into the algorithm and this dilutes the value that citations used to provide. There are just more things to optimize for in local search these days.

2. As local search gains more widespread adoption, more businesses are getting their citations consistent and built out, and so citations become less of a competitive difference maker than they were in the past.

Yes, we are seeing citations dropping in significance year after year, but that doesn't mean you don't need them. Quite the opposite, really. If you don't get them, you're going to have a bad time. Google looks to your citations to help understand how prominent your business is. A well established and popular business should be present on the most important business directories in their industry, and if it's not, that can be a signal of lower prominence to Google.

The good news is that citations are one of the easiest items to check off your local search to do list. There are dozens of services and tools out there to help you get your business listed and accurate for only a few hundred dollars. Here's what I recommend:

1. Ensure your business is listed, accurate, complete, and duplicate-free on the top 10-15 most important sites in your industry (including the primary data aggregators and industry/city-specific sites).

2. Build citations (but don't worry about duplicates and inconsistencies) on the next top 30 to 50 sites.

Google has gotten much smarter about citation consistency than they were in the past. People worry about it much more than they need to. An incorrect or duplicate listing on an insignificant business listing site is not going to negatively impact your ability to rank.

You could keep building more citations beyond the top 50, and it won't hurt, but the law of diminishing returns applies here. As you get deeper into the available pool of citation sites, the quality of these sites decreases, and the impact they have on your local search decreases with it. That said, I have heard from dozens of agencies that swear that "maxing out" all available citation opportunities seems to have a positive impact on their local search, so your mileage may vary. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The future of local search

One of my favorite questions in the commentary section is "Comments about where you see Google is headed in the future?" The answers here, from some of the best minds in local search, are illuminating. The three common themes I pulled from the responses are:

1. Google will continue providing features and content so that they can provide the answers to most queries right in the search results and send less clicks to websites. Expect to see your traffic from local results to your website decline, but don't fret. You want those calls, messages, and driving directions more than you want website traffic anyway.

2. Google will increase their focus on behavioral signals for rankings. What better way is there to assess the real-world popularity of a business than by using signals sent by people in the real world. We can speculate that Google is using some of the following signals right now, and will continue to emphasize and evolve behavioral ranking methods:

1. Searches for your brand name.

2. Clicks to call your business.

3. Requests for driving directions.

4. Engagement with your listing.

5. Engagement with your website.

6. Credit card transactions.

7. Actual human foot traffic in brick-and-mortar businesses.

3. Google will continue monetizing local in new ways. Local Services Ads are rolling out to more and more industries and cities, ads are appearing right in local panels, and you can book appointments right from local packs. Google isn't investing so many resources into local out of the goodness of their hearts. They want to build the ultimate resource for instant information on local services and products, and they want to use their dominant market position to take a cut of the sales.

And that does it for my summary of the survey results. A huge thank you to each of the brilliant contributors for giving their time and sharing their knowledge. Our understanding of local search is what it is because of your excellent work and contributions to our industry.

There is much more to read and learn in the actual resource itself, especially in all the comments from the contributors, so go dig into it:

Click here for the full results!

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Announcing the 2018 Local Search Ranking Factors Survey

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It has been another year (and a half) since the last publication of the Local Search Ranking Factors, and local search continues to see significant growth and change. The biggest shift this year is happening in Google My Business signals, but we're also seeing an increase in the importance of reviews and continued decreases in the importance of citations.

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Score TONC

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How persona spectrums champion real user needs

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Radiating Information By Building An Agile Project Wall * RIIS

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Information radiators are valuable Agile tools in building transparency from the project team level to stakeholders.

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Money can't buy happiness, but it can rent it for a long time. Knowing this, a great deal of effort has been spent trying to find out how to maximize the happiness we get out of the money we spend. Lately, it has been almost cliché to mention how studies show buying experiences is better for happiness than buying things. However, new research reveals a glaring problem with that cliché.

The thing about things

A paper recently published in Psychological Science by Jacob C. Lee, Deborah Hall, and Wendy Wood questions the methods of previous studies which tend to use relatively affluent college students as guinea pigs. The goal of the study was to see if the results of previous tests held up when less affluent people were included.

The researchers asked their test subjects to answer questions about their income, job, and education level. The subjects were then categorized according to their answers to give a sense of their social class using the MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status.

The three tests began. The subjects were first asked to recall a recent purchase of a material item and an experience. That purchase was then ranked on a scale showing how happy it made them and placed on a range from "definitely experiential" to "definitely object."

The data was clear, while the higher-class participants were made happiest by material purchases, the lower-class participants were made happiest by purchasing objects.

In the second test, the participants were randomly assigned to recall either a material or experiential purchase they had made and rate how happy it had made them. Again, the higher-class test subjects said they were made happiest by purchasing experiences while lower-class subjects favored material goods.

In the last test, the participants were again asked to recall either a material or experiential purchase, and then imagine that their income was either raised or lowered by 50%. They were then asked to consider how they would alter their budget given this change and how it would make them feel to have this shock to their finances occur.

After imagining that their finances had changed for a bit, they were then asked to consider how happy either a material or experiential purchase would make them. Some participants were told to think of the same items they had thought of at the start of the task and others were told to think of new ones they could make at their new, imagined, income level.

While the effect was minor, there was a tendency for people to favor buying experiences when they imagined their finances improving and buying goods when their condition worsened.

What does this all mean?

When money is tight, buying material things makes us happier than buying experiences. When we're rolling in cash, it's the other way around.

Writer Juliet Hodges suggests that the findings relate to how much leisure time we have. The idea being that well-off people will need to buy experiences to fill it while worse-off people would want items that save time. This idea is based on several studies that show how much happier people are made by time-saving purchases.

It should be noted though that the study was based on people remembering how happy their purchases made them. This reduces the reliability of the study since memory can be faulty. However, the basic finding of the study is supported by the last test even without appealing to memory.

So, what should I do if I'm in the lower class?

Don't think that you can't be happy because you know buying experiences is irresponsible given your current condition. The best thing to do, from a purely cost benefits stance, is to buy the things you need. The happiness payoff will be just as good as if you had bought an overpriced night out instead.

Wasn't this obvious?

It seems kind of obvious that people who don't have enough money for extravagant experiential purchases might get more happiness out of having certain things, some of which might be desperately needed. However, previous studies into this idea had not taken income levels into account and tended to have test subjects who were more affluent than the rest of the population.

It is yet another example of a phenomenon that was only studied in certain groups; leading us to have an incorrect idea about how other people were affected. The tendency to use college students as guinea pigs happens so much there is even an acronym for the typical test subject: WEIRD.

Having more things doesn't always equal more happiness, but not having anything isn't much fun either. This paper reminds us that studies on how money can influence happiness must take care to remember people without money too.

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Is buying experiences better than buying things? Not for everyone

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Money can't buy happiness, but it can rent it for a long time. Knowing this, a great deal of effort has been spent trying to find out how to maximize the happiness we get out of the money we spend. Lately, it has been almost cliché to mention how studies show buying experiences is better for happiness than buying things.

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This is the last article in a series of guides for content specialists on how to write successfully both for people and search engines in 2018. Check out previous posts and stay tuned for new updates.
Effective Content Marketing has always been based on a well-organised content strategy, clearly defined targets, and constant analysis of the results.

How can you determine the success of your digital content? How do you figure out what kind of content attracts your audience and allows you to achieve your marketing goals? You start by measuring and analyzing your content performance by looking at the right metrics.

In this article, you will find 23 essential content metrics and learn how you can interpret, analyze, and measure them.

User Behavior Metrics

Pageviews

Shows the total number of times a particular page on your website was visited.

Pageviews can give you a basic understanding of how good your content has performed in comparison with other posts published in the same period. This metric can show what kind of topics attract the most attention from your audience. It's one of the key metrics to take from a website content audit, allowing you to intelligently consider your strategy moving forward.

How to measure:

SEMrush Content Audit - Projects > Set up a project > Content Audit tab > Connect Google Analytics. You can check Pageviews going back 30 days for the articles you're tracking.

Google Analytics - Behavior > Site content > All Pages tab. You can sort it by Unique Pageviews. When the data displays you can see which posts perform best, as well as check traffic for specific URLs.

Unique Visitors

Indicates the total number of visitors who viewed a particular page on your website.

This metric is similar to Pageviews, but it can provide you with more accurate insights on how many new visitors your content attracts. Evaluating the number of unique visitors helps you to determine the scope of your audience.

How to measure:

Google Analytics - Audience > Overview > Top row, second from left. Choose the date period in the upper right corner.

New and Returning Users

Shows the ratio between new and returning visitors.

The number of new visitors indicates the number of potential leads, while the number of returning visitors shows if the visitors like your content. It is better to have a healthy mix of both: that means, your content can attract new users and retain the old ones.

How to measure:

Google Analytics - Audience > Behavior > New vs. Returning.

Page Depth

Demonstrates the average number of pages your users visit per session beyond the landing page.

This metric indicates how engaging your overall content is. If this number is too low, this might be a sign of poor content interlinking, or low-quality website design and navigation.

How to measure:

Google Analytics - Audience > Behavior > Engagement > in the Distribution tab select Page Depth.

Average Time on Page

Indicates if the visitors are attentively reading your content or just skimming it. If the "time on page" on some content pieces is significantly lower than on others, it can show you which types of content are liked more and less. Analyze the best-performing articles and compare them to the least-performing articles. Try to determine why some are doing better than others. Do they differ by length, by form or by topic? Do they include infographics, images or video? Replicate what works.

How to measure:

SEMrush Content Audit - Projects > Set up a project > Content Audit tab > Connect Google Analytics. You can check Average time on page going back 30 days for the articles you're tracking.

Google Analytics - Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.

Bounce Rate

Indicates the percentage of users that left the particular page without visiting any other website pages.

A high bounce rate can indicate that something isn't quite right with the page. If you have an e-commerce site, a high bounce rate can be a worrying signal, because it means that most customers leave your website without making a purchase.

Check your page load speed and your CTAs. Maybe your SEO needs some tweaking or people are not finding what they were looking for on this particular page.

Analysis and interpretation of a bounce rate should depend on the type of website or web page, so don't panic. For example, a high bounce rate on a blog may be normal if you have a number returning visitors who read new articles, find relevant information, and leave your website after that.

How to measure:

SEMrush Content Audit - Projects > Set up a project > Content Audit tab > Connect Google Analytics. You can check Bounce rate over 30 days for the articles you're tracking.

Google Analytics - Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.

Pages Per Session

Indicates the average number of pages viewed during a session on your website.

This metric shows if your content is engaging and organized well enough to motivate a visitor to discover another web page. If your blog or website has proper and helpful interlinking (links to posts with more detailed information on the subject), users will be more likely to visit more than one page.

How to measure:

Google Analytics - Audience > Overview > Pages/Session.

Traffic Sources

Shows which sources bring traffic to your website.

This can help you discover the best and the worst marketing channels for you and help you determine what is, and what is not, working for you. Does the majority of your audience come from search engines, or is your social media strategy stronger than your SEO? Or maybe your brand is already well-known, and you mostly get direct traffic?

Analyzing traffic sources allows you to identify which marketing channels and strategies are working best for your content distribution. You can also identify the channels with good potential and perhaps a larger investment in resources or a tweaking of strategy would make a massive difference.

How to measure:

1. Google Analytics - Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels.

2. SEMrush - Domain Analytics > Traffic Analytics > Traffic Sources.

Engagement Metrics

Likes and Shares

These are indicators of your content engagement and popularity among your audience. However, a share is more significant than a like because it not only shows that someone found your content interesting but also expanded its reach.

How to measure:

1. SEMrush Post Tracking - Projects > Set up a project > Post Tracking tab > Add a URL or a group of URLs. You can see the total number of shares as well as the number of shares for each piece of content (including your external publications).

2. SEMrush Social Media Tracker - Projects > Set up a project > Overview > Engagement. You can see the total engagement of your content on social media.

Comments

The number of comments under the post demonstrates the level of content engagement even better than social likes and shares do. It takes more time to write a comment than to like or share a post (of course, we are talking about valuable comments). So, if a reader was motivated enough to express his opinion in a comment section, it is often a good sign.

How to measure:

1. SEMrush Social Media Tracker - Projects > Set up a project > Overview > Choose a social media you are interested in. You can see the number of comments and replies to your posts on social media.

2. To manage your blog comments, use Disqus or Commentful (tracking of your comments and online conversations).

Mentions

Mentions measure performance and engagement from your content. Track mentions of your content both in social media and other media channels; pay special attention to their sentiment, context, and authors.

How to measure:

1. SEMrush Brand Monitoring Tool - Projects > Set up a project > Mentions. You can track your mentions by source, period, presence or absence of backlink.

2. Buzzsumo - Monitoring. You can filter your mentions by brands, competitors, backlinks, keywords or authors.

Re-publications

If another article partly quotes your content or refers to it as a source, this can be considered as a mention. And if the full text of your article, your infographic, video or another piece of content are published on a third-party website, this counts as a republication.

When you find a republication of your content, make sure the author included the link to the original post. It will help you to attract a more targeted audience to your website.

How to measure:

SEMrush Brand Monitoring Tool - Projects > Set up a project > Mentions > Connect Google Analytics > Top Backlinks table. This allows you to see and assess the amount of referral traffic from all of your backlink mentions to your particular landing page.

You can also check the average traffic of a third-party website with SEMrush Traffic Analytics you will understand the potential reach you gain with this republication.

You can also ask the author to include an utm link. In this case, you can track referral traffic to your website via Google Analytics - Acquisition > Campaigns > All campaigns.

Incoming Requests

A high number of incoming requests is a straight indicator of your content quality, whether it is an invitation to write new material, to give an interview, to share your knowledge base, or to cooperate in any other way.

SEO Outcome Metrics

Organic Traffic

Shows the number of people who found your website through a search engine.

Low figures may indicate that an article or page was not optimized properly. So to increase organic traffic, you need to pay attention to proper search engine optimization.

How to measure:

Google Analytics - Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels > Check the Organic search group. By clicking on it, you will get information on keywords that people have used to find your website.

Dwell Time

Dwell Time indicates the average length of time a visitor spends on the page before returning to the SERPs.

This metric is very important for your SEO: if a user comes to your webpage and returns right away to the search results, this is a negative signal to search engines and it affects your ranking.

How to measure:

Analyze your bounce rate, session duration, and time on page. If you have a low bounce rate and high time on page, it means users stay on your web page or website, so you have a high dwell time.

Backlinks

Backlinks are one of the most important Google ranking factors, and therefore one of the key content and PR metrics. Pay special attention to the number of links (do not forget to exclude spammy ones), the number of unique domains, and the quality of the referring domains.

How to measure:

1. SEMrush - Domain Analytics > Backlinks. You can find the total number of backlinks, your referring domains and IPs, new and lost backlinks, top anchors and much more.

2. SEMrush Brand Monitoring Tool - Projects > Set up a project > Mentions > 'Link to site' filter. You can see all mentions of your brand or product that include links to your website.

3. SEMrush Post Tracking - Projects > Set up a project > Post Tracking tab > Add a URL or a group of URLs. You can see the total number of backlinks and discover websites pointing to a particular publication.

Keywords

Check the performance of your post for your targeted keywords. How many keywords is your content ranking for in the Google top 3? How is this page performing compared to your competitors? These should be all questions being explored when using your content management software.

How to measure:

1. SEMrush Post Tracking - Projects > Set up a project > Post Tracking tab > Add a URL or a group of URLs. You can see for which keywords your webpage is ranking in SERPs.

2. SEMrush Position Tracking - Projects > Set up a project > Add keywords you are interested in. Track your positions for your target keywords.

Company Revenue

Number of Leads

The number of potential clients, who have shared their personal details throughout the content produced by you. You can get them through contact forms, sign-ups for updates and newsletters, downloads of materials and so on.

How to measure:

To track leads generated by your content you need to set up corresponding goals in Google Analytics. You can read a guide on creating goals in this article.

Existing Leads Touched

It is not enough to just get a new lead. To achieve your marketing and business goals, it is very important to accompany your prospects in their purchasing processes. By analyzing the number of existing leads that interacted with your content you can evaluate and develop better lead nurturing.

How to measure:

Track the number of returning users in Google Analytics.

Conversion Rate

The percentage of visitors who took a desired action (click, registration, download, etc.) after interaction with your content.

How to measure:

Track the number of conversions and divide it by the number of total clicks on your link, banner or CTA during the same time period.
Conversion Rate = Conversions/Total clicks
Revenue Influenced / ROI

Return on investment (ROI) is the percentage of revenue we take from different actions. In this case, it will be the revenue related to the content created by you or your team.

How to measure:

Take the profit of your investment, subtract the cost of the investment, and divide the total by the cost of the investment:
ROI = (Return - Investment)/Investment
Choosing Relevant Content Metrics

To start, think about your marketing and business goals. What is "success" for you? What ROI are you looking for? If your brand has good visibility, then metrics such as likes, shares or web traffic may not be the key metrics in your content marketing strategy. In this case, you could focus on the number of new visitors you attract and/or new leads generated by your content.

Don't forget the metrics that will help you track success in regards to reaching your target audience and the effectiveness of your distribution channels. If your content does not bring you desired results, try to assess your distribution channels. Maybe, the channels you are using are not relevant to your audience, and you should invest your efforts in other marketing channels.

And last but not least, don't analyze your data using just one metric. Always try to take into consideration different data based on various metrics. By examining all available data as a whole, you will gain a clear and complete picture of your content results.

Measure and analyze your digital content to improve your strategy and stay on top!

If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.

- Lord Kelvin

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23 Essential Content Marketing Metrics [Infographic]

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To figure out the effectiveness of your efforts, you need to regularly measure and analyze your content performance. However, that is not always easy to understand what kind of data you should take into account to assess and improve your Content Mark...

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Google has launched a new tool that measures many aspects of a website, including how well it follows SEO best practices.

The new tool is currently in open beta and available at web.dev.

Web.dev is designed to help developers and site owners apply modern web capabilities by providing analysis and recommendations.

Google says this tool is the culmination of 10+ years learning about user needs.

"As the bar for high-quality experience continues to rise, users are quickly disappointed in a web experience that doesn't deliver. And then they're gone.

We believe, however, the web now has the capabilities to overcome that challenge-to give all users the best possible experience wherever they are."

In an effort to help site owners provide the best possible experience for users, web.dev has audits for SEO, performance, accessibility, and more.

The tool looks for:

Performance: Audits for metrics like first paint and time to interactive to determine lag.

PWA: Assesses your page against the baseline Progressive Web App Checklist.

Best Practices: Looks for everything from HTTPS usage to correct image aspect ratios.

SEO: Checks for best practices to ensure your site is discoverable.

Accessibility: Checks for common issues that may prevent users from accessing your content.

Any site can be measured simply by entering the URL. Here's what it looks like after measuring Search Engine Journal:

Beneath the section pictured in this example is a list of recommended improvements.

Recommendations are listed in the order of how great an impact they will have on the site. This takes the guesswork out of deciding what to prioritize.

A detailed report can also be downloaded which provides further guidance on how the site can be improved in each area.

Reports are generated on a daily basis. So if the recommendations are implemented immediately, it may not be reflected in the report until the next day.

More Resources

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Google Launches New Tool That Grades A Site's SEO Implementation - Search Engine Journal

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Google has launched a new tool that measures many aspects of a website, including how well it follows SEO best practices. The new tool is currently in open beta and available at web.dev. Web.dev is designed to help developers and site owners apply modern web capabilities by providing analysis and recommendations.

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Voorbeelden

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What Is Disruption, Really? 8 Examples and What to Learn From Them

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If you've read an article about a hot new app, or a tech-based service that's taken off in the past few years, you've likely encountered it being described as "disruptive." But after seeing this term thrown around for half the companies in Silicon Valley, and hearing it applied to concepts in your own business or organization, you might be skeptical about its value -- or at least, its usage.

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Laws of UX is a collection of best practices that designers can consider when building user interfaces.

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Local SEO: A Simple (But Complete) Guide

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Local SEO: A Simple (But Complete) Guide

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Any marketer or entrepreneur who's agonised over split-tests will understand what happens when you alter the shade of a background, button, or image.

Colours evoke emotions, convey subliminal messages and most importantly, have a huge impact on our decision making process. As a marketer who cares about anything that will improve results by a mere 1% (because I understand the long-term implications of every percentile), I know the psychological power of colour.

A recent study (shortstack, Kissmetrics) has revealed that 84.7% of consumers cite colour as the primary reason they buy a particular product, and that ads in colour are read 42% more than the same ads in black and white.

Those figures are huge! And it shows that colour is not a basic element that you can simply skip over.

In this post, we're going to analyse the most commonly used colours in marketing, so you too can understand their psychological power, uses and real-world applications.

Strap yourself in, because we're going in deep.

The Psychology of Colour in Marketing: Primary Colours

Primary colours are the first layer on the colour wheel and the building blocks for every other colour.

Psychology of Colour: Red's Effects

Red is a colour that dominates. It has huge psychological and physical effects on viewers and is widely used in marketing. We associate it with two of our most powerful psychological triggers:

Red can be used to display romance, love and sexuality, as well as aggression, blood and evil. It's these triggers that make red such a powerful attention grabber.

Its power to draw the eye also increases importance. Think of the red carpet as a great example of this.

The colour has also been proven to have physical effects, increasing blood circulation, breathing rates and even metabolism. This increase in metabolism actually creates hunger, and is one of the reasons that most fast-food chains and restaurants use red in branding and promotions.

Psychology of Colour: Red's Uses

Red's ability to draw attention and create importance make it an attractive proposition, but, due to its dominating nature, it should be used sparingly.

The colour is perfect for short-term, irregular promotions like FLASH SALES and offers. The next time you walk down the high-street, look for a shop with a sale sign in the window. I bet that sign's red. If you're going to use it, I recommend you do it the same way.

Unless, of course, you're in the food business. Red is used as a primary branding colour by McDonalds, Burger King, Pizza hut, Dominos, Panda Express, KFC ,Wendy's, Papa John's ...

...the list of giants goes on and on. Use the physical effect on metabolism to increase order sizes and your average customer value.

Psychology of Colour: Yellow's Effects

Yellow is an interesting colour. It can have differing effects, depending on its shade.

Light and bright yellows incite happiness. They trigger thoughts of summer, sun and warmth. The psychological effects of this activate optimism and positivity...

...but, the same shade of light yellow can also act as a warning sign. Road signs and 'caution' tape is a great example of this.

Darker yellows like gold, create a sense of wealth, importance and antiquity, which is particularly useful to brands trying to push towards the high-end of the market.

Psychology of Colour: Yellow's Uses

Yellow's ability to create optimism and happiness is a powerful stimuli in campaigns that are trying to create energy and demonstrate playfulness.

It's an eye catching colour and brands that use it are instantly recognisable.

The sense of warning that light yellow triggers is useful for creating reminders. Brands like Post-It have used this link to build their profile in a very broad, unprotected market.

It is also used in this way by the world's biggest online retailer, Amazon as an 'Add to Cart button'. Their investment in conversion rate optimisation proves that yellow really can have a powerful effect on buying decisions.

Dark yellow, particularly on a black background, is often used by brands trying to create an air of luxury around their promotion.

Psychology of Colour: Blue's Effects

Blue is the internet's colour of choice and there's good reason for it. It's on more websites than any other colour and that's because it triggers trust, calm and honesty

Blue is incredibly versatile too. The lighter shades are vibrant, eye-catching and fresh, with clear links to crystal clear seas and summer skies. These brighter variations of blue have refreshing effects too, making it the perfect backing for a whole host of different companies.

We link dark blues with security and trust, making them the perfect choice for banks, finance and other similar professional industries.

Psychology of Colour: Blue's Uses

Blue is a great choice for any brand selling 'black-box' products. A black-box product is something that cannot be seen or touched, think banks, software, security or marketing services.

As the colour of trust, it's also a great choice for campaigns that deal with health. Consider the toothpaste in your bathroom, does the branding include any blue? Oral-B, Aquafresh, Crest, Macleans, Arm and Hammer and Sensodyne, all feature blue in their branding. The same applies for many other niches selling health and fitness products.

With its strong links to security and trust, dark blue becomes a great option for businesses who deal in professional sectors.

Despite all its useful applications, blue does not work well in the food industry. There are very few natural foods that have any blue in them and as such, the colour has no link to eating, hunger or food. If you're selling food products, steer clear of blue.

Blue should not be overlooked as a powerful colour for your marketing campaigns though. It has strong psychological effects that clearly link to buying decisions. If you're aiming to increase trust, use blue (with white) on your landing pages.

Secondary colours are the next layer on the colour wheel. They are the result of mixing two primary colours. E.g. red+ yellow = orange.

Psychology of Colour: Orange's Effects

Orange is an interesting colour and from my experience, the most overlooked colour when it comes to marketing (I'll explain this in further detail in the 'Uses' sub-section).

Orange is similar to red in that it also creates physical effects (breathing, blood pressure, etc.), but to a smaller extent.

It brings energy, playfulness and excitement to a marketing campaign, and these triggers can create impulse clicks and snap decisions.

This secondary colour also adds vibrancy to a website and always draws the eye, but it has its down sides too...

...because of its playful, youthful feel, orange can make your site, brand or landing pages feel cheap, especially when its overdone. If you're targeting the luxury market, avoid this colour.

Psychology of Colour: Orange's Uses

There is a commonly held belief that the best converting 'add to cart' and buying buttons are Green, and there's sound psychological reasoning behind this...

...but, why is it that Amazon, the world's biggest online retailer use orange as their 'Buy Now' button colour? And, why did they also use this as their 'add-to-cart' button before switching to a two button strategy?

In all our split-tests, orange regularly comes out above green when it comes to CTA's. This might have something to do with its cheap feel, but it also might be because Amazon has created a psychological trigger by using it. Think about it, you've probably bought something from Amazon and that means you've hit an orange buying button. If you're presented with one again, you've been conditioned to click it to buy.

As well as buying buttons, orange is a great way to emphasise a friendly, welcoming service and demonstrate creativity. If you're in a creative industry, don't be afraid to use it!

Psychology of Colour: Purple's Effects

Purple's most prominent psychological trigger is that of nobility and royalty, making it an amazing choice for brands aiming for luxury and elegance.

This secondary colour comes at the complete opposite end of the spectrum to orange. It creates feelings of mystery, romance and maturity and has incredible high-end appeal.

Purple's connection with wealth and decadence make it a great branding choice, but offers little in terms of impulse buys, marketing material and CTA's.

Psychology of Colour: Purple's Uses

When was the last time you saw an 'add to cart', 'register now', or even a 'sign in' button that was purple?

The colour is very rarely used for CTA's. We've tested them (to see why everyone avoids them) and discovered it's because they don't work. Our Purple CTA came in lowest of all colours tested!

Despite purple not having any psychological connection with food, it has been used to powerful effects in the chocolate niche, with brands like Cadbury and Milka using it to evoke decadence and luxury.

Purple is a great way to increase the perceived value of a product/service or brand, and should be used to do this, just don't use it on pages that require urgency!

Psychology of Colour: Green's Effects

Green's clearest and most obvious psychological link is with nature, the environment and the great outdoors.

This organic feel makes it a straight forward branding and marketing choice when promoting ethical and natural features.

Green is a calming and balancing influence on people, especially when using lighter or pastel shades like mint.

This secondary colour is also strongly associated with 'Go' signs, movement and growth, making it a firm favourite in any marketers toolbox.

Psychology of Colour: Green's Uses

As mentioned earlier, green is widely used in CTA's. It stands out and triggers that 'go' feeling. Whilst orange has come out on top in numerous split-tests we've performed, green is consistently high and sometimes beats it in terms of conversion.

If you've got a product that has any links with the environment, you should definitely use green. Studies have proven that environmental friendliness has become increasingly important in consumer's buying decisions. Use it in your branding to emphasise this natural and ethical link.

Very few brands are brave enough to prominently feature green in their branding, if you want to stand out and can see a clear link between the psychological triggers and your product, click green for go.

Neither primary or secondary colours, black and white are so crucial in marketing that they had to be included in this colour list.

Psychology of Colour: Black's Effects

Black is the most prominent and powerful of all the colours. It's almost always used as text, because it stands out so well on light backgrounds (like this one).

Despite the saying 'black is the new black', it's actually increasing in popularity, particularly in marketing materials from some of the biggest brands in the world.

Its sophisticated, edgy and elegant feel make it the perfect choice for brands hoping to increase anticipation and give themselves the very elusive 'cool' factor.

Psychology of Colour: Black's Uses

I've never seen a black CTA and cannot comment on whether they are effective because we've never tried them!

Black makes high-impact landing pages and marketing materials, particularly when it dominates the page, but it should be used sparingly.

Despite black being such a powerful colour, it doesn't stand out as well as brighter colours in locations where there is a lot of competition for attention (newsfeeds, ads, etc.)

If you're hoping to add elegance, mystery and sophistication use black against white on your website.

Psychology of Colour: White's Effects

White pairs with anything and this is why it's used on most designs. Look back through the images in this blog so far, how many of them use white as a background, or for text, icons and designs?

As a feature colour white creates a sense of cleanliness, minimalism and purity, making it a big favourite with brands hoping to give a modern crisp feel to their material.

White also evokes creativity, giving us the space to think (just like a blank page), and when used as a background, helps to draw eyes to the all-important page feature.

Psychology of Colour: White's Uses

It's tough to place white's uses, because it depends what colours it's used with.

One thing's for sure, white doesn't work as a CTA. A white button, on a white background wouldn't stand out, draw attention or create any sort of urgency.

However, the majority of your websites and landing pages should prominently feature white. It decreases clutter and ensures that a visitor's focus remains where you want it.

Colours have almost immeasurable psychological effects, particularly in the digital world.

You can make a huge impact on the decisions of your visitors, prospects and customers purely by changing the predominant colour at key stages of your funnel.

Creating awareness, proving trustworthy during evaluation and converting visitors can all be increased just by making a colour change.

If you don't already, I suggest going away and split testing the power of colours, particularly on your marketing materials and CTA's. Use the advice in this guide to increase your numbers.

And remember, there are always exceptions to the rule. If you strongly believe that something will work in your industry, test it.

What do you think about the psychology of colours in marketing? Leave a comment or send us a message!

If you're running ads, check out our ROAS Calculator to accurately estimate your advertising break even point before even starting you campaign!

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The Psychology of Colour in Marketing: The Ultimate Guide to Landing Pages, Branding and CTA Power Colours - Einstein Marketer

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Any marketer or entrepreneur who's agonised over split-tests will understand what happens when you alter the shade of a background, button, or image. Colours evoke emotions, convey subliminal messages and most importantly, have a huge impact on our decision making process.