Brand Development, Web Design, and Google Analytics Specialists
Experienced in SEM, SEO, Social Media, and Traditional Media
The Top 11 Benefits of Guest Blogging
* Original article *
Guest blogging is one of the best online marketing strategies you can invest in.
If you want to spread your brand’s message and win the trust of your target audience, start contributing content to other blogs related to your market or niche.
Not convinced you should work hard writing content for someone else’s site?
You should know that guest blogging offers many major benefits – both for your company and you, personally.
Here are the top 11 benefits of guest blogging.
1. Instant Exposure to Targeted Traffic
Regardless if you whether you get a link to your site, contributing to other blogs should pique your audience’s interest. If you manage to write a top-quality post, expect traffic to start flowing to your site once it goes live.
Traffic is the lifeblood of any online business or blog. Something as simple as a guest post can potentially translate into sales if you do it the right way.
Optimize your website’s landing pages, CTAs, and other elements to boost your chances at conversion.
2. Expand Your Personal Network
There was a time when connecting with influencers was extremely difficult. But with guest blogging, the process is now simple.
For example, some websites that accept guest posts foster a community of contributors engaged in related niches. In some cases, you’ll get the chance to take part in an email thread where contributors brainstorm potential topics. You can also collaborate with others for co-authored posts.
Regardless of what the community’s structure in a particular site is, you can always leverage your authorship. Seek partnership opportunities with influencers – from content cross-promotion to expert interviews.
All you need to do is be active in the community. Leave comments, share other posts, or cold-email your prospects. If possible, you can even invite influencers as contributors to your own blog.
3. Stimulate Social Media Shares
Generating social media shares is one way to exponentially extend your online reach. The more shares your branded content gets, the more shareworthy it’ll be in the eyes of your audience.
If you’re submitting a guest post to a blog with plenty of social media activity, then shares should come naturally once your content gets published.
To get the ball rolling faster, consider embedding highly shareable content in your guest post. Infographics, for example, can help you get 3x more engagement in social media than any other type of content.
4. Grow Your Social Media Following
Guest blogging not only increases the amount of social media shares to your content, it can also boost your follower count and accelerate your lead generation efforts.
By contributing to an authoritative blog, you are essentially getting them to vouch for your brand. This makes you look good in the eyes of their followers.
In most guest blogging arrangements, you also get to customize your contributor profile. Here you can include links to your social media accounts.
All these benefits will make it easier to win your target audience’s trust and turn them into active social media followers. Remember to reward them by posting regular updates and sharing useful information that aligns with their interests.
5. Improve Your Online Authority
Modern online marketing is all about authority. Even with the best content in the world, it’ll be difficult to convert your audience into loyal subscribers or paying customers if they don’t trust your brand.
By contributing to other authoritative blogs, you get the chance to prove your credibility as an information source. It will make your target audience realize that you’re someone who’s recognized by trustworthy brands. And as a result, they’ll be more receptive to any value proposition you may present in your own site.
6. Fortify Your Backlink Profile
Most blogs that accept guest posts allow their contributors to leave at least one link to their own site. After all, most of them don’t offer any monetary compensation for your hard work. A brief brand mention or keyword-optimized link is the least they could do to reward your efforts.
Still, even a single backlink from an authoritative blog will greatly benefit your SEO. They make your content more discoverable and indexable to search engines like Google. As much as possible, try to target websites in your own niche to build relevancy.
7. Grow Brand Awareness
Guest blogging is a great way to establish your authority in your niche.
As much as possible, try to share practical tips that aren’t already found elsewhere.
Leverage the opportunity to let them know what your company does and how it would solve problems.
Also, be sure to instill your brand’s voice into every single post you submit. This will make your personal brand more recognizable regardless of where you submit guest posts.
Some popular bloggers, such as Larry Kim, use a conversational and humorous approach to engage readers. They also avoid writing fluff while keeping sentences short and easy to read.
8. Generate Qualified Leads
One of the fundamental steps to a successful guest blogging strategy is picking the right websites.
In addition to niche relevancy, you also need to look for sites that already have a steady stream of traffic. This will help you connect with people who are already interested in what you offer as a business.
Always emphasize an actionable step when developing the page that you’re bringing traffic to. It should be related to the guest post you’ve submitted to the other blog. Otherwise, your link is nothing more than a disruption in your audience’s journey — a waste of time for them and a lost lead for you.
9. Shorten the Sales Cycle
The sales funnel has always been a challenge for content marketers. By distributing content through popular blogs, you are immediately building your target audience’s familiarity with your brand. Thus, you are shortening the sales cycle for your products and services.
Think of it this way: rather than waiting for potential leads to come to your site, you can introduce your brand’s value propositions in your guest posts.
You just need to be smart when picking or pitching topic ideas for your guest posts.
10. Get Useful Feedback from the Community
As a guest blogger, another advantage of being active in the community is that you get to receive insightful feedback from other contributors.
When you talk about strategies, for example, other experts may tune in to share their own ideas through the comments section. As a result, you can further develop or refine your strategy with their suggestions in mind.
To invite contributors to comment, try adding a call-to-action in the conclusion paragraph. You can refer to the end of this post to see how it works.
11. Sharpen Your Content Marketing Skills
Guest blogging requires every area of content marketing to be successful. It requires you to do content research, adopt the right writing voice for a particular audience, perform influencer outreach, and so on.
Remember, the best way to learn content marketing tactics is to deploy them yourself. You can’t just read about them, follow everything to the letter, and hope for the best.
By launching your own guest blogging campaign, you’re positioning yourself for growth in every facet of content marketing.
Conclusion
Guest blogging is, without a doubt, a crucial step for online marketing success. Once you grasp its benefits, give it a shot and see if you can make it work for your brand.
8 Old School Marketing Tactics That Work for Social Media
Link to Original article
Okay, so it’s hard to imagine Don Draper meeting with Bethlehem Steel execs in Sterling Cooper’s top floor Madison Avenue boardroom, telling them to get on Snapchat. But even though we no longer think of typewriters as “technology” or describe TVs as “radios with pictures,” there are plenty of solid ideas from the Mad Men-era of advertising that translate to social media.
So let’s throw it back to a time before #ThrowbackThursday existed for some good old-fashioned advice from the old-school pros.
1. Doing smart, thorough research
In the premier episode of Mad Men, Don Draper trashes an in-house researcher’s report on the psychology of cigarette users and decides to wing a presentation for Lucky Strike executives instead. While Draper pulls it off, not all ad executives were so cavalier.
“Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals,” said David Ogilvy, the founder of Ogilvy & Mather who was credited as the “Original Mad Man” and the “Father of Advertising.”
Ogilvy’s experience at Gallup’s Audience Research Institute taught him to value data way before Big Data became a thing. His knack for research-supported copywriting is best exemplified in his headline for a 1960s Rolls-Royce ad, widely considered one of the best auto taglines of all time.
Nowadays, social media marketers looking to emulate the OG Mad Man’s advice should support their strategies with analytics platforms and research-backed ideas.
2. Learning the rules, then breaking them
There are more game changers in the Advertising Hall of Fame than there are rule followers.
“Rules are what the artist breaks; the memorable never emerged from a formula,” said ad exec William Bernbach, creative director who co-founded the agency Doyle Dane Bernbach in 1949.
Bernbach’s “Think Small” campaign for Volkswagen in the 1960s threw out the rulebook for traditional print ads. To sell the compact Beetle to muscle car-crazed Americans, Bernbach’s team departed from convention by picturing a very tiny car on a page filled mainly with blank space. The small idea translated to a big boost in sales and brand loyalty.
Rule breaking may seem trickier on social media, but it’s still possible. BETC’s “Like My Addiction” campaign caught more than 100K Instagrammers by surprise with the reveal that the Parisian “it girl” Louise Delage was a fake account designed to portray a textbook alcoholic. Created for French organization Addict Aide, the initiative demonstrated that it can be difficult to spot signs of youth alcoholism.
3. Avoiding sleazy bait-and-switch tactics
Known as the world’s first female copywriter and the author of the first ad to use sex appeal, Helen Lansdowne Resor was keeping advertising real long before the ad men of the swinging 60s and 70s came onto the scene.
Her conviction that “copy must be believable,” can be found throughout her entire body of work, including her early copywriting for Woodbury Soap Company in 1910. Smooth taglines like “A skin you love to touch,” and “Your skin is what you make it” remained in circulation for decades.
Social media marketers can take Lansdowne Resor’s point in two ways. First, copy should not be too over-the-top or exaggerated, especially since teens are skeptical when it comes to trusting brands. Avoid empty platitudes or superlatives that may arouse doubt.
Second, don’t lie. Millennials are 43 percent more likely than other generations to call a brand out on social media. You dig?
4. Getting right to the heart of things
It’s hard to imagine that the “I ❤ New York” slogan was invented in a pre-emoji world. Sparse in word count and minimal in design, the logo is emblematic of co-creator Jane Maas’ direct approach to advertising.
In How to Advertise, a book Maas co-wrote with colleague Kenneth Roman, she explains, “Commercial attention does not build. Your audience can only become less interested, never more. The level you reach in the first five seconds is the highest you will get, so don’t save your punches.”
The advice is eerily applicable to video marketing in the current digital media ecosystem, where attention spans are running shorter than ever, especially among today’s teenyboppers. You must catch your audience’s attention immediately, or risk losing them entirely.
Check out The Four Key Ingredients of a Perfect Social Video for more pointers on creating punchy video campaigns.
5. Using the right imagery
Inspired by a sea lion performance at a zoo, John Gilroy developed the “My Goodness, My Guinness” for the Irish beer company in the late 1920s. The series depicts a flabbergasted zookeeper prying his beer from the arms of a polar bear, the pouch of a kangaroo and the jaws of a crocodile. And, of course, a toucan.
The humorous misadventures of the zookeeper pop with vibrant colors set against an often-white backdrop. Keen observers point out that it was Gilroy’s uniform use of typography that helped solidify Guinness’ brand image. The popularity of the artwork and consistency of style made it one of the longest advertising campaigns in history.
Using images is a great way to up your social media game, especially since visuals can aid in information retention. Marketers should ensure that photos complement branding and style guidelines. And where possible, add the logo and logotype to the image. Consistency in style is a bonus, but it will help your followers recognize your brand on any platform.
If you don’t have access to artists, photographers, or graphic designers, check out these resources for creating quick and beautiful images for social media.
6. Ditching the one-size-fits-all approach
As the first black man in Chicago advertising, Tom Burrell quickly saw that advertising boardrooms had a diversity problem. Too often, ad execs would create content for white audiences and expect it to have broad appeal. Or, they’d create a commercial for white actors and film a second version with black actors.
After witnessing a number of tone-deaf gaffs and insensitive blunders, Burrell found himself repeating to his colleagues, “Black people are not dark-skinned white people.”
By advocating for tailoring messages for specific communities, he was one of the first to pioneer ethnic micro targeting in advertising. He founded his own agency, Burrell Communications, in 1971 and quickly became the authority on crafting messages for African-American audiences.
In work he did for McDonalds, Burrell reasoned that the company’s slogan “You deserve a break today” sounded too occasional for many African Americans who had a more regular experience with the fast food chain. Instead, he came up with lines like “Sure is good to have around” and “Get down with something good at McDonald’s.”
With Gen Zers forming the most ethnically diverse population in U.S. history, Burrell’s approach is one that social media marketers should put in practice.
Here’s how to find your audience on social media.
7. Knowing that context matters
In 1970, advertisers working for Schaefer beer created a print ad to commemorate the company’s tradition of producing America’s oldest lager. The minimal layout was designed to place emphasis on the year Schaefer’s lager was introduced, with a 10-word tagline reading: “1842. It was a very good year for beer drinkers.”
The two-page ad was placed in a number of popular publications such as LIFE Magazine. But its placement in Ebony Magazine, a publication with a predominantly African American readership, drew criticism.
As Tom Burrell points out in an interview with NPR Planet Money, the year 1842 in the United States was a year many black people were enslaved. “It just screamed insensitivity,” he says. “It was a horrible year for us.”
Getting context wrong can make a brand appear ignorant at best. At worst, it can cause lasting damage to a brand’s image.
Getting context right, on the other hand, can have a positive effect. Wells Fargo adapted its television commercial so that would be optimized for Facebook, where viewers prefer shorter content and may watch videos without sound. To promote the launch of Friends and prove the show’s relevance, Netflix’s Pre-Roll campaign shows viewers a clip related to the YouTube video they’re about to watch.
Social media marketers should shift from cross-posting to cross-promoting, with content tailored to suit each platform.
8. Engaging the audience in a conversation
In the 1950s, American advertising executive Shirley Polykoff’s personal approach to copywriting convinced women across the United States to colour their hair. By posing the question “Does she… or doesn’t she?” in Clairol hair-dye commercials, she reassured women that a hair colouring—then a new fad—could look natural.
“Copy is a direct conversation with the consumer,” she said. Her lingo was so effective that it’s now part of the vernacular: “So natural only her hairdresser knows for sure” and “Is it true blondes have more fun?” Who knows, maybe if she’d worked on a campaign for Rogaine we’d still be using the phrase Chrome Dome.
Besides being concise and memorable, Polykoff does something important in her copy that all modern social media marketers should take note of—she asks a question. Posing questions to your audience is a great way to get followers engaged and increase the visibility of your campaigns, such as Airbnb’s #TripsOnAirbnb campaign.
To get the conversation going on social media, Airbnb asked followers to describe their perfect vacation in three emojis. Not only did the prompt generate hundreds of responses, but Airbnb kept the conversation going by responding to each submission with Airbnb Experience suggestions. Remember, if you want to start a convo, follow-through is key.
More brands have been exploring the opportunities to engage via direct messaging, too. To jumpstart conversations between brands and users, Facebook just introduced Click-to-Messenger ads.
The Top 99 Marketing Terms You Should Know
Above The Fold Agency thought it was time to provide a holistic marketing glossary – Here are the top 99 terms that are imperative to anyone learning about marketing. We hope this helps you through your journey…
A
1) A/B Testing
This is the process of comparing two variations of a single variable to determine which performs best in-order-to help improve marketing efforts. This is often done in email marketing (with variations in the subject line or copy), calls-to-action (variations in colors or verbiage), and landing pages (variations in content).
2) Analytics
Analytics is essentially the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data. When referred to in the context of marketing, it’s looking at the data of one’s initiatives (website visitor reports, social, PPC, etc.), analyzing the trends, and developing actionable insights to make better informed marketing decisions.
3) Application Programming Interface (API)
APIs are a series of rules in computer programming, which allow an application to extract information from a service and use that information either in their own application or in data analyses. It’s kind of like a phone for applications to have conversations — an API literally “calls” one application and gets information to bring to you to use in your software. APIs facilitate the data needed to provide solutions to customer problems.
B
4) B2B (Business-to-Business)
An adjective used to describe companies that sell to other businesses. For example, Google and Oracle are primarily B2B companies.
5) B2C (Business-to-Consumer)
An adjective used to describe companies that sell directly to consumers. For example, Amazon, Apple, and Nike are primarily B2C companies.
6) Blogging
This is short for web log or weblog. An individual or group of people usually maintains a blog. A personal blog or business blog will traditionally include regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material, such as photos and video.
Blogging is a core component of inbound marketing, as it can accomplish several initiatives simultaneously — like website traffic growth, thought leadership, and lead generation. It does not, however, do your taxes.
7) Business Blogging
Business blogging retains all the attributes of “regular” blogging, but adds a tasty layer of marketing strategy on top. It helps marketers drive traffic to their website, convert that traffic into leads, establish authority on certain topics, and drive long-term results.
When blogging for a business, marketers should create posts that are optimized with keywords that their target audience is searching for and provide helpful, educational material to these readers. Typically, these blog posts should be actionable (by providing an opt-in, downloadable offer), as to provide a metric for the effectiveness of the business blogging.
8) Bottom of the Funnel
The bottom of the funnel refers to a stage of the buying process leads reach when they’re just about to close as new customers. They’ve identified a problem, have shopped around for possible solutions, and are very close to buying.
Typically, next steps for leads at this stage are a call from a sales rep, a demo, or a free consultation — depending on what type of business is attempting to close the lead.
9) Bounce Rate
Website bounce rate: The percentage of people who land on a page on your website and then leave without clicking on anything else or navigating to any other pages on your site. A high bounce rate generally leads to poor conversion rates because no one is staying on your site long enough to read your content or convert on a landing page (or for any other conversion event).
Email bounce rate: The rate at which an email was unable to be delivered to a recipient’s inbox. A high bounce rate generally means your lists are out-of-date or purchased, or they include many invalid email addresses. In email, not all bounces are bad, so it’s important to distinguish between hard and soft bounces before taking an email address off your list.
10) Buyer Persona
A semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. While it helps marketers like you define their target audience, it can also help sales reps qualify leads.
C
11) Call-to-Action
A call-to-action is a text link, button, image, or some type of web link that encourages a website visitor to visit a landing page and become of lead. Some examples of CTAs are “Subscribe Now” or “Download the Whitepaper Today.” These are important for marketers because they’re the “bait” that entices a website visitor to eventually become a lead. So, you can imagine that it’s important to convey a very enticing, valuable offer on a call-to-action to better foster visitor-to-lead conversion.
12) CAN-SPAM
CAN-SPAM stands for “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing.” It’s a U.S. law passed in 2003 that establishes the rules for commercial email and commercial messages, it gives recipients the right to have a business stop emailing them, and outlines the penalties incurred for those who violate the law. For example, CAN-SPAM is the reason businesses are required to have an “unsubscribe” option at the bottom of every email.
13) CASL
CASL stands for “Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation.” It’s a Canadian law passed in 2013 that covers the sending of “commercial electronic messages” that may be accessed by a computer in Canada. CASL covers email, texts, instant messages, and automated cell phone messages sent to computers and phones in Canada.
14) Churn Rate
A metric that measures how many customers you retain and at what value. To calculate churn rate, take the number of customers you lost during a certain time frame, and divide that by the total number of customers you had at the very beginning of that time frame. (Don’t include any new sales from that time frame.)
For example, if a company had 500 customers at the beginning of October and only 450 customers at the end of October (discounting any customers that were closed in October), their customer churn rate would be: (500-450)/500 = 50/500 = 10%.
15) Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
The percentage of your audience that advances (or clicks through) from one part of your website to the next step of your marketing campaign. As a mathematic equation, it’s the total number of clicks that your page or CTA receives divided by the number of opportunities that people had to click (ex: number of page views, emails sent, and so on).
16) Closed-Loop Marketing
The practice of closed-loop marketing is being able to execute, track and show how marketing efforts have impacted bottom-line business growth. An example would be tracking a website visitor as they become a lead to the very last touch point when they close as a customer.
17) Conversion Path
A conversion path is a series of website-based events that facilitate lead capture. In its most basic form, a conversion path will consist of a call-to-action (typically a button that describes an offer) that leads to a landing page with a lead capture form, which redirects to a thank you page where a content offer resides. In exchange for his or her contact information, a website visitor obtains a content offer to better help them through the buying process.
18) Content
In relation to inbound marketing, content is a piece of information that exists for the purpose of being digested (not literally), engaged with, and shared. Content typically comes in the form of a blog, video, social media post, photo, slideshow, or podcast, although there are plenty of over types out there. From website traffic to lead conversion to customer marketing, content plays an indispensable role in a successful inbound marketing strategy.
19) Content Management System (CMS)
A web application designed to make it easy for non-technical users to create, edit, and manage a website. Helps users with content editing and more “behind-the-scenes” work like making content searchable and indexable, automatically generating navigation elements, keeping track of users and permissions, and more.
20) Content Optimization System (COS)
A COS is basically a CMS (Content Management System), but optimized to deliver customers the most personalized web experience possible.
21) Context
If content is king, then context is queen. Serving up valuable content is important, but ensuring that it’s customized for the right audience is equally (if not more) important. As buyers become more in control of what information they digest (again, not literally), it’s important to deliver content that’s contextually relevant.
22) Conversion Rate
The percentage of people who completed a desired action on a single web page, such as filling out a form. Pages with high conversion rates are performing well, while pages with low conversion rates are performing poorly.
23) Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
The process of improving your site conversion using design techniques, key optimization principles, and testing. It involves creating an experience for your website visitors that will convert them into customers. CRO is most often applied to web page or landing page optimization, but it can also be applied to social media, CTAs, and other parts of your marketing.
24) Cost-Per-Lead (CPL)
The amount it costs your marketing organization to acquire a lead. This factors heavily into CAC (customer acquisition cost), and is a metric marketers should keep a keen eye on.
25) Crowdsourced Content
Creating your own content can take more time than you have to lend to it — which is where crowdsourcing comes into play. Allowing subject matter experts, customers, or freelancers to create your content for you is a prime way to get more quality content published in less time. Compile the content you get back into a really awesome offer and give credit to all the contributors — a win-win for everyone involved.
26) Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Your total Sales and Marketing cost. To calculate CAC, follow these steps for a given time period (month, quarter, or year):
- Add up program or advertising spend + salaries + commissions + bonuses + overhead.
- Divide by the number of new customers in that time period.
For example, if you spend $500,000 on Sales and Marketing in a given month and added 50 customers that same month, then your CAC was $10,000 that month.
27) Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
A set of software programs that let companies keep track of everything they do with their existing and potential customers.
At the simplest level, CRM software lets you keep track of all the contact information for these customers. But CRM systems can do lots of other things, too, like tracking email, phone calls, faxes, and deals; sending personalized emails; scheduling appointments; and logging every instance of customer service and support. Some systems also incorporate feeds from social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others.
28) CSS
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, and it’s what gives your entire website its style, like colors, fonts, and background images. It affects the mood and tone of a web page, making it an incredibly powerful tool. It’s also what allows websites to adapt to different screen sizes and device types.
D
29) Dynamic Content
A way to display different messaging on your website based on the information you already know about the visitor. For example, you could use Smart CTAs so that first-time visitors will see a personalized CTA (perhaps with a top-of-the-funnel offer) and those already in your database see a different CTA (maybe for content that offers a little more information about your product or service).
E
30) E-book
E-books are a common type of content that many marketers use, often to help generate leads. They are generally a more long-form content type than, say, blog posts, and go into in-depth detail on a subject.
31) Editorial Calendar
It’s like a road map for content creation, showing you what kind of content to create, what topics to cover, which personas to target, and how often to publish to best support your strategy. Maintaining an editorial calendar will keep you more organized and show you any gaps you may have in your content library. It also helps ensure you’re doing the right things for your personas and not going way off-track with the topics you’re covering.
32) Email
In its most basic sense, email stands for “Electronic Mail.” It’s a core component of marketing because it’s a direct connection to a contact’s inbox. However, with great power comes great responsibility, meaning it’s important for marketers to not abuse the email relationship with a contact. It’s far too easy for a contact to click “unsubscribe” after gaining their hard earned trust in your communication.
33) Engagement Rate
A popular social media metric used to describe the amount of interaction — Likes, shares, comments — a piece of content receives. Interactions like these tell you that your messages are resonating with your fans and followers.
34) Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is content that continues to provide value to readers no matter when they stumble upon it. In other words, it can be referenced long after it was originally published, and even then, it’s still valuable to the reader.
Typically, a piece of evergreen content is timeless, valuable, high quality, and canonical or definitive. These posts are typically a content marketer’s best friend because of the tremendous SEO value they provide.
F
35) Facebook
Facebook is a social network you’re likely quite familiar with already — but it has become so much more than just a platform to publish content and gain followers. You can now utilize the awesome targeting options available through Facebook advertising to find and attract brand new contacts to your website and get them to convert on your landing pages … but remember, you still need awesome content to do it.
While it’s a core component of any marketing strategy, it shouldn’t be the only component. Focusing entirely on Facebook (or any other large social channel, for that matter) will only give you a small piece of the inbound marketing pie. And it’s still piping hot, so be careful.
36) Form
The place your page visitors will supply information in exchange for your offer. It’s also how those visitors can convert into precious sales leads. As a best practice, only ask for information you need from your leads in order to effectively follow up with and/or qualify them.
37) Friction
Any element of your website that is confusing, distracting, or causes stress for visitors, causing them to leave your page. Examples of friction-causing elements include dissonant colors, too much text, distracting website navigation menus, or landing page forms with too many fields.
G
38) Google+
Google+ (referred to as “Google Plus”) is a social network that allows you to join and create circles in which you can mix and match family members, friends, colleagues, and fellow industry members. While you can use it much like other social networks — to publish and share content, and generate new leads — it also provides content marketers with tremendous SEO value due to the rising importance of social sharing in search engine algorithms.
H
39) Hashtag
Hashtags are a way for you and your readers to interact with each other on social media and have conversations about a particular piece of content. They tie public conversations on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram together into a single stream, which users can find by searching for a hashtag, clicking on one, or using a third-party monitoring tool.
The hashtags themselves are simply a keyword phrase, spelled out without spaces, with a pound sign (#) in front of it — like #InboundChat and #ChocolateLovers. You can put these hashtags anywhere in your social media posts.
40) HTML
This is short for HyperText Markup Language, a language used to write web pages. It’s at the core of every web page, regardless the complexity of a site or number of technologies involved, and provides the basic structure of the site — which is then enhanced and modified by other technologies like CSS and JavaScript.
I
41) Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing refers to marketing activities that draw visitors in, rather than marketers having to go out to get prospects’ attention. It’s all about earning the attention of customers, making the company easy to find online, and drawing customers to the website by producing interesting, helpful content. By aligning the content you publish with your customer’s interests, you naturally attract inbound traffic that you can then convert, close, and delight over time.
42) Inbound Link
An inbound link is a link coming from another site to your own website. “Inbound” is generally used by the person receiving the link.
Websites that receive many inbound links can be more likely to rank higher in search engines. They also help folks receive referral traffic from other websites.
43) Infographic
A highly visual piece of content that is very popular among digital marketers as a way of relaying complex concepts in a simple and visual way.
44) Instagram
Though initially a haven only for younger generations who wanted to post, edit, and share unique-looking photos, Instagram has grown into a premier social network that’s a viable opportunity for content marketers. Many businesses are taking advantage of the site by posting industry related photos that their followers and customers would enjoy seeing.
J
45) JavaScript
JavaScript is a programming language that lets web developers design interactive sites. Most of the dynamic behavior you’ll see on a web page is thanks to JavaScript, which augments a browser’s default controls and behaviors.
Uses for JavaScript include pop-ups, slide-in calls-to-action, security password creation, check forms, interactive games, and special effects. It’s also used to build mobile apps and create server-based applications.
K
46) Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
A type of performance measurement companies use to evaluate an employee’s or an activity’s success. Marketers look at KPIs to track progress toward marketing goals, and successful marketers constantly evaluate their performance against industry standard metrics. Examples of KPIs include CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), blog traffic sources, and homepage views. Choose KPIs that represent how your marketing and business are performing.
47) Keyword
Sometimes referred to as “keyword phrases,” keywords are the topics that webpages get indexed for in search results by engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Picking keywords that you’ll optimize a webpage for is a two-part effort. First, you’ll want to ensure the keyword has significant search volume and is not too difficult to rank for. Then, you’ll want to ensure it aligns with your target audience
After deciding the appropriate keywords you want to rank for, you’ll then need to optimize the appropriate pages on your website using both on-page and off-page tactics.
L
48) Landing Page
A landing page is a website page containing a form that is used for lead generation. This page revolves around a marketing offer, such as an e-book or a webinar, and serves to capture visitor information in exchange for the valuable offer. Landing pages are the gatekeepers of the conversion path and are what separates a website visitor from becoming a lead.
A smart inbound marketer will create landing pages that appeal to different personae (plural for persona) at various stages of the buying process. A hefty endeavor no doubt, but one that pays off in spades.
49) Lead
A person or company who’s shown interest in a product or service in some way, shape, or form. Perhaps they filled out a form, subscribed to a blog, or shared their contact information in exchange for a coupon.
Generating leads is a critical part of a prospect’s journey to becoming a customer, and it falls in between the second and third stages of the larger inbound marketing methodology, which you can see below.
Landing pages, forms, offers, and calls-to-action are just a few tools to help companies generate leads.
50) Lead Nurturing
Sometimes referred to as “drip marketing,” lead nurturing is the practice of developing a series of communications (emails, social media messages, etc.) that seek to qualify a lead, keep it engaged, and gradually push it down the sales funnel. Inbound marketing is all about delivering valuable content to the right audience — and lead nurturing helps foster this by providing contextually relevant information to a lead during different stages of the buying lifecycle.
51) LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site. Launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. Nowadays, with more than 414 million registered members, LinkedIn is the most popular social network for professionals and one of the top social networks overall. Getting on the platform, developing a completed profile, and networking has helped many a jobseeker find work.
52) Lifecycle Stages
These divisions serve as a way to describe the relationship you have with your audience, and can generally be broken down into three stages: awareness, evaluation, and purchase.
What’s important to understand about each of these stages is that not every piece of content you create is appropriate, depending on what stage your audience might fall in at that moment. That’s why dynamic content is so great — you can serve up content that’s appropriate for whatever stage that particular visitor is in.
53) Lifetime Value (LTV)
A prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer. To calculate LTV, follow these steps for a given time-period:
- Take the revenue the customer paid you in that time-period.
- Subtract from that number the gross margin.
- Divide by the estimated churn rate (aka cancellation rate) for that customer.
For example, if a customer pays you $100,000 per year where your gross margin on the revenue is 70%, and that customer type is predicted to cancel at 16% per year, then the customer’s LTV is $437,500.
54) Long-Tail Keyword
A long-tail keyword is a very targeted search phrase that contains three or more words. It often contains a head term, which is a more generic search term, plus one or two additional words that refine the search term. For example:
- Head term: unicorn
- Long-tail keywords: unicorn games online, unicorn costumes for kids,
Long-tail keywords are more specific, which means visitors that land on your website from a long-tail search term are more qualified, and consequently, more likely to convert.
55) LTV:CAC
The ratio of lifetime value (LTV) to customer acquisition cost (CAC). Once you have the LTV and the CAC, compute the ratio of the two. If it costs you $100,000 to acquire a customer with an LTV of $437,500, then your LTV:CAC is 4.4 to 1.
M
56) Marketing Automation
While there’s some overlap with the term “lead nurturing,” marketing automation is a bit different. Think of marketing automation as the platform with associated tools and analytics to develop a lead nurturing strategy. If you’ll let me run with an “art” analogy, marketing automation is the paintbrush, watercolors, and blank canvas. Lead nurturing is the artist that makes it all come together. Like Bob Ross! You can’t paint a happy little nurturing campaign without both.
Bonus: Want to get super-savvy with your marketing automation terminology? Take it to the next level with behavior-based marketing automation. Behavior-based marketing automation refers to a system that triggers emails and other communication based on user activity on and off your site. It enables marketers to nurture leads and send them information only when it is most relevant to their stage in the buying cycle.
57) Microsite
A cross between a landing page and a “regular” website. ElfYourself.com is a great example. Microsites are used when marketers want to create a different online experience for their audience separate from their main website. These sites often have their own domain names and distinct visual branding.
58) Middle of the Funnel
This refers to the stage that a lead enters after identifying a problem. Now they’re looking to conduct further research to find a solution to the problem. Typical middle of the funnel offers include case studies or product brochures — essentially anything that brings your business into the equation as a solution to the problem the lead is looking to solve. Also, if you want to be cool, you can refer to this stage as “MOFU” for short.
59) Mobile Marketing
With mobile search queries officially surpassing desktop queries, now is probably the time to explore mobile marketing. What is it? Well, mobile marketing refers to the practice of optimizing marketing for mobile devices to provide visitors with time- and location- sensitive, personalized information for promoting goods, services, and ideas.
60) Mobile Optimization
Mobile optimization means designing and formatting your website so that it’s easy to read and navigate from a mobile device. This can be done by either creating a separate mobile website or incorporating responsive design in initial site layout. Google’s algorithm now rewards mobile-friendly websites, so if your site isn’t fully optimized for mobile devices, you will likely see a hit to your ranking on mobile searches.
61) Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
The amount of revenue a subscription-based business receives per month. Includes MRR gained by new accounts (net new), MRR gained from upsells (net positive), MRR lost from down-sells (net negative), and MRR lost from cancellations (net loss).
N
62) Native Advertising
A type of online advertising that takes on the form and function of the platform it appears on. Its purpose is to make ads feel less like ads, and more like part of the conversation. That means it’s usually a piece of sponsored content that’s relative to the consumer experience, isn’t interruptive, and looks and feels similar to its editorial environment.
Native advertising can come in many forms, whether it’s radio announcers talking favorably about a product sponsoring the show, or an article about a product or company showing up in your news source.
63) Net Promoter Score (NPS)
A customer satisfaction metric that measures, on a scale of 0-10, the degree to which people would recommend your company to others. The NPS is derived from a simple survey designed to help you determine how loyal your customers are to your business.
To calculate NPS, subtract the percentage of customers who would not recommend you (detractors, or 0-6) from the percent of customers who would (promoters, or 9-10).
Regularly determining your company’s NPS allows you to identify ways to improve your products and services so you can increase the loyalty of your customers.
64) News Feed
A news feed is an online feed full of news sources. On Facebook, the News Feed is the homepage of users’ accounts where they can see all the latest updates from their friends. The news feed on Twitter is called Timeline.
65) No-Follow Link
A no-follow link is used when a website does not want to pass search engine authority to another webpage. It tells search engine crawlers not to follow or pass credit to linked websites as-a-way to avoid association with spammy content or inadvertently violating webmaster guidelines. To varying degrees, the no-follow attribute is recognized by all major search engines, like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Not all links (and linking domains) are created equal, and a no-follow attribute helps avoid any foul play.
O
66) Offer
Offers are content assets that live behind a form on a landing page. Their primary purpose is to help marketers generate leads for your business. There are many different types of offers you could create, including e-books, checklists, cheat sheets, webinars, demos, templates, and tools.
67) On-Page Optimization
This type of SEO is based solely on a webpage and the various elements within the HTML (see “H” if you skipped here directly). Ensuring that key pieces of the specific page (content, title tag, URL, and image tags) include the desired keyword will help a page rank for that particular phrase.
68) Off-Page Optimization
Off-page SEO refers to incoming links and other outside factors that impact how a webpage is indexed in search results. Factors like linking domains and even social media play a role in off-page optimization. The good news is that it’s powerful; the not so good news is that it’s mostly out of an inbound marketer’s control. The solution? Create useful, remarkable content and chances are people will share and link to it.
P
69) Page View
A request to load a single web page on the internet. Marketers use them to analyze their website and to see if any change on the webpage results in more or fewer page views.
70) Pay-per-Click (PPC)
The amount of money spent to get a digital advertisement clicked. Also an internet advertising model where advertisers pay a publisher (usually a search engine, social media site, or website owner) a certain amount of money every time their ad is clicked. For search engines, PPC ads display an advertisement when someone searches for a keyword that matches the advertiser’s keyword list, which they submit to the search engine ahead of time.
PPC ads are used to direct traffic to the advertiser’s website, and PPC is used to assess the cost effectiveness and profitability of your paid advertising campaigns.
There are two ways to pay for PPC ads:
- Flat rate: where the advertiser and publisher agree on a fixed amount that will be paid for each click. Typically this happens when publishers have a fixed rate for PPC in different areas on their website.
- Bid-based: where the advertiser competes against other advertisers in an advertising network. In this case, each advertiser sets a maximum spend to pay for a given ad spot, so the ad will stop appearing on a given website once that amount of money is spent. It also means that the more people that click on your ad, the lower PPC you’ll pay and vice versa.
71) Pinterest
Pinterest is a visual social network typically used by ecommerce marketers, but not without its fair share of top-notch B2B and B2C content marketers. Businesses and consumers alike use the website to post images and photos they like so fellow users can repin (share) that content.
72) PPC
PPC, (or Pay-Per-Click) is an advertising technique in which an advertiser puts an ad in an advertising venue (like Google AdWords or Facebook), and pays that venue each time a visitor clicks on the ad.
Q
73) Qualified Lead
A contact that opted in to receive communication from your company, became educated about your product or service, and is interested in learning more.
74) QR Code
A QR code (abbreviated from Quick Response code) is a specific matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code) that is readable by dedicated QR barcode readers and camera telephones. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded may be text, URL, or other data. It also starts with “Q,” which is a rarity with marketing-related terms.
R
75) Responsive Design
This is the practice of developing a website that adapts accordingly to how someone is viewing it. Instead of building a separate, distinct website for each specific device it could be viewed on, the site recognizes the device that your visitor is using and automatically generates a page that is responsive to the device the content is being viewed on — making websites always appear optimized for screens of any dimension.
76) Return on Investment (ROI)
A performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency and profitability of an investment, or to compare the efficiency and profitability of multiple investments. The formula for ROI is: (Gain from Investment minus Cost of Investment), all divided by (Cost of Investment). The result is expressed as a percentage or ratio. If ROI is negative, then that initiative is losing the company money. The calculation can vary depending on what you input for gains and costs.
Today, marketers want to measure the ROI on every tactic and channel they use. Many facets of marketing have pretty straightforward ROI calculations (like PPC), but others are more difficult
77) Retweet
A re-posting of a tweet posted by another user on Twitter. Retweets look like normal tweets except for the retweet icon. They can be done in three ways:
1) You can retweet an entire tweet by clicking the retweet button.
2) You can post a new tweet that includes your own commentary. In a new tweet, which also features the original tweet. It means you’ve pressed the rotating arrow icon to retweet a post, and then added a comment in the text box provided. We prefer this method of retweeting because it allows you to add your own thoughts. (Note: The retweet takes up 24 characters, leaving you with 116 characters for the comment.)
3) You can post a new tweet that includes your own commentary in addition to the information you’re retweeting. The formula is this: Your own commentary + RT + the original tweeter’s Twitter handle + colon + the exact text from their original tweet. This method of retweeting allows you to add your own thoughts, but with a very limited character count.
When you see “Please RT” in someone’s tweet, it means they are requesting that their followers retweet that tweet to spread awareness.
S
78) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The practice of enhancing where a webpage appears in search results. By adjusting a webpage’s on-page SEO elements and influencing off-page SEO factors, an inbound marketer can improve where a webpage appears in search engine results.
There are a ton of components to improving the SEO of your site pages. Search engines look for elements including title tags, keywords, image tags, internal link structure, and inbound links — and that’s just to name a few. Search engines also look at site structure and design, visitor behavior, and other external, off-site factors to determine how highly ranked your site should be in the search engine results pages.
79) Sender Score
An email marketing term that refers to a reputation rating from 0-100 for every outgoing mail server IP address. Mail servers will check your Sender Score before deciding what to do with your emails. A score of over 90 is good.
80) Service Level Agreement (SLA)
For marketers, an SLA is an agreement between a company’s sales and marketing teams that defines the expectations Sales has for Marketing and vice versa. The Marketing SLA defines expectations Sales has for Marketing with regards to lead quantity and lead quality, while the Sales SLA defines the expectations Marketing has for Sales on how deeply and frequently Sales will pursue each qualified lead.
SLAs exist to align sales and marketing. If the two departments are managed as separate silos, the system fails. For companies to achieve growth and become leaders in their industries, it is critical that these two groups be properly integrated.
81) Small-to-Medium Business (SMB)
Usually defined as companies that have between 10 and 500 employees.
82) Smarketing
A fun phrase used to refer to the practice of aligning Sales and Marketing efforts. In a perfect world, marketing would pass off tons of fully qualified leads to the sales team, who would then subsequently work every one of those leads enough times to close them 100% of the time. But since this isn’t always how the cookie crumbles, it’s important for Marketing and Sales to align efforts to impact the bottom line the best they can through coordinated communication.
83) Snapchat
A social app that allows users to send and receive time-sensitive photos and videos known as “snaps,” which are hidden from the recipients once the time limit expires. (Note: Images and videos still remain on the Snapchat server). Users can add text and drawings to their snaps and control the list of recipients in which they send them to.
A Snapchat story is a string of Snapchats that lasts for 24 hours. Users can create stories to be shared with all Snapchatters or just a customized group of recipients.
84) Social Media
Social media is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+ are examples of social media networks that one can join for personal or business use. Social Media is a core component of Inbound, as it provides marketers with additional channels to spread reach, increase growth, and reach business goals.
85) Social Proof
Social proof refers to a psychological phenomenon in which people seek direction from those around them to determine how they are supposed to act or think in a given situation. It’s like when you see a really long line outside a nightclub and assume that club is really good because it’s in such high demand. In social media, social proof can be identified by the number of interactions a piece of content receives or the number of followers you have. The idea is that if others are sharing something or following someone, it must be good.
86) Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
Any software that is hosted by another company, which stores your information in the cloud. Examples: HubSpot, Salesforce, IM clients, and project management applications.
T
87) Top of the Funnel
Sometimes called “TOFU”, top of the funnel refers to the very first stage of the buying process. Leads at this stage are just identifying a problem that they have and are looking for more information. As such, an inbound marketer will want to create helpful content that aids leads in identifying this problem and providing next steps toward a solution.
88) Twitter
For the sake of creativity, I’ll define Twitter in 140 characters or less: “Twitter is a platform that allows users to share 140-character long messages publicly. User can follow one another and be followed back.”
U
89) Unique Visitor
A person who visits a website more than once within a period of time. Marketers use this term in contrast with overall site visits to track the amount of traffic on their website. If only one person visits a webpage 30 times, then that web page has one UV and 30 total site visits.
90) URL
This is short for Uniform Resource Locator. I honestly didn’t know that before writing this definition. Basically, this is the address of a piece of information that can be found on the web such as a page, image, or document (ex. http://www.huspot.com). URLs are important for on-page SEO, as search engines scour the included text when mining for keywords. If a keyword you’re looking to get indexed for is in the URL, you’ll get brownie points from search engines (but no real brownies, unfortunately).
91) User Experience (UX)
The overall experience a customer has with a particular business, from their discovery and awareness of the brand all the way through their interaction, purchase, use, and even advocacy of that brand. To deliver an excellent customer experience, you have to think like a customer, or better, think about being the customer.
92) User Interface (UI)
A type of interface that allows users to control a software application or hardware device. A good user interface provides a user-friendly experience by allowing the user to interact with the software or hardware in an intuitive way. It includes a menu bar, toolbar, windows, buttons, and so on.
V
93) Viral Content
This term is used to describe a piece of content that has become wildly popular across the web through sharing.
W
94) Website
A website is a set of interconnected webpages, usually including a homepage, generally located on the same server, and prepared and maintained as a collection of information by a person, group, or organization. An inbound marketer should structure a website like a dynamic, multi-dimensional entity that can be used to attract relevant website visitors, convert those visitors into leads, and close those leads into customers. Otherwise, it’s just a brochure — and let’s be honest — could you really use another brochure?
95) Word-of-Mouth (WOM)
The passing of information from person to person. Technically, the term refers to oral communication, but today it refers to online communication, as well. WOM marketing is inexpensive, but it takes work and involves leveraging many components of inbound marketing like product marketing, content marketing, and social media marketing.
96) Workflow
A workflow is another way to describe a lead nurturing campaign. It’s a set of triggers and events that move a lead through the nurturing process. A workflow can also serve other purposes, such as adjust contact properties on a lead record based on certain conditions, or adding a contact record to a certain list. Regardless of how you use it, workflows can be a very powerful asset in an inbound marketing strategy.
X
97) XML Sitemap
We couldn’t leave “X” out of the party! An XML sitemap is a file of code that lives on your web server and lists all of the relevant URLs that are in the structure of your website. It’s kind of like a “floor plan” for the site, which especially comes in handy whenever the site gets changed. It also helps search engine web crawlers determine the structure of the site so they can crawl it more intelligently.
Sitemaps don’t guarantee all links will be crawled, and being crawled does not guarantee indexing. However, a sitemap is still the best insurance for getting a search engine to learn about your entire site. It’s sort of like saying “Hey, Google — check out this fine website.”
Y
98) YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website on which users can upload, share, and view videos. Three former PayPal employees created YouTube in February 2005. In November 2006, YouTube, LLC was bought by Google Inc. for $1.65 billion, and is now operated as a subsidiary of Google. YouTube is the largest video-sharing site in the world and you’re probably on it now instead of finishing up this post.
Z
99) Zilch
We couldn’t think of anything for “Z.”
Why Going Cheap on Your Branding Is One of the Worst Mistakes You Can Make
Going cheap on your brand development could not only lead to a disconnect with potential customers, but could also result in your company shutting its doors as a result of low sales.
Your brand has a life.
Believe it or not, this thing you’ve created has legs to stand on, living and breathing every day. While this may sound high-minded, statistics prove otherwise. According to a study compiled by Bop Design, 54 percent of people don’t trust brands. But for those who do, 64 percent cite sharing a common bond with the brand as their primary reason for following or purchasing from them.
Why is this the case? Because your brand is your business’s first impression, and if done poorly, possibly the last. To some, branding seems like a luxury investment (and in some cases, this is true). However, going cheap on your brand development could not only lead to a disconnect with potential customers, but could also result in your company shutting its doors as a result of low sales. It’s a nightmare scenario for most entrepreneurs, which is why I’m going to go over a few reasons why investing in your brand is one of the wisest investments you could make.
A story you can sink your teeth into.
Breathe life into your business with a brand story or mission statement. Let’s be honest, coming up with your brand’s story is not an easy task. It’s going to take a lot of self-reflection and doubt, running through your purpose as to why your business exists in the first place. Additionally, this mantra will be what dictates every piece of copy or content your company puts out, creating a skeleton of how your voice will sound.
Let’s look at Whole Foods. The company could have created a wholesome-looking logo to lure people through its doors, but the multi-national retailer takes careful measures to back up its introduction to consumers. The brand has built a foundation of offering healthy and nutritious foods, and this foundation informs every marketing initiative and company development. From offering in-store educational experiences to teach consumers about food and emerging brands to getting involved in community-building programs through donating food to shelters and supporting local vendors, Whole Foods doesn’t just view its brand story as a marketing ploy, but leans on its pillars to guide the brand forward.
As Kissmetrics points out, there’s an actual science to what we deem as an authentic brand story. This breaks down to what’s essentially called neural coupling, or the emotional connection we feel when hearing a story. However, reaching this point might not be easily solved on your own, especially if you’re in a time crunch to launch.
While it’s up to you to have an agency or consulting firm take over your entire branding objectives, a lot of this is going to come from you. It’s not a bad idea to gain an outside perspective from someone to ask you the tough questions on why you started your business and what it represents, as well as where exactly you want it to head. The love you feel for what you’ve created is something most will understand, which is why having a third party pull the beauty of that out of you and translate it in a way others can comprehend is vital.
Because once you release your brand to the outside world, the perception of what it represents no longer belongs to only you anymore.
Your brand is more than just a logo.
A common misconception by novices in the branding world is making the assumption that a logo and a brand are synonymous. While your logo is one of the most important visual assets for your company — it is just the beginning. From there, you need bring your brand to life by embodying your values through marketing initiatives, product development and customer experience enhancements. Your brand’s goal is to represent an idea or shared truth between you and your audience, and that shared truth should permeate into the ethos of your business. It’s a common bond that drives towards a specific mission, which is something you’re going to miss the mark on by simply going for a cheap logo with the idea you’ll fix it later on.
When it comes to your logo, this symbol is going to represent an ethos that reflects upon how your company is aiming to change the world. Take the Whole Foods logo, for example. Many consumers in every major market across the country not only instantly recognize the green Whole Foods font, but new consumers also immediately recognize what the Whole Foods brand stands for thanks to the homage its logo pays to fruit and natural foods.
There’s plenty of places you can get a quality logo that won’t break the bank (I recommend checking out Deluxe). Remember, your logo is literally going to be everywhere your company is, so make it worth the ink it’s printed on. Plus, when done right, your logo is going to serve the purpose of telling your brand’s story without saying a word. So you have your logo … now what?
People talk, so you should listen.
How your brand is going to interact with the outside world will largely dictate the success of your company. From trade shows to social media, every interaction can give a valid perspective on who your company actually is. As Pew Research notes, more than 68 percent of all U.S. adults are on social media, so the potential amount of feedback you might receive could be tremendous.
Your brand is going to represent that universal truth you share with your consumers. Although discovering this is going to be tough, the rewards will be tremendous. People will no longer just be fans, but evangelists for what you’re about. Which begs the question: Are you ready to not just tell your story, but make it one that can stand the test of time?
About Andrew Medal: He is the founder of creative digital agency Agent Beta. He has helped organizations like the California Education Department, Proctor & Gamble, Microsoft, Warner Bros. and Inc. Magazine.
How to Write Good Instagram Bios to Make an Impression in 2017
Writing good Instagram bios might seem straightforward, but it actually requires a lot of thought. According to researchers, it takes less than two-tenths of a second for an online visitor to form an impression of your account. It’s really important for that first impression to be a good one!
In the following guide, we’ll walk you through how to write a good Instagram bio that makes a great first impression, explains what your business does, and convinces new visitors to click the “follow” button!
Good Instagram Bios Tip #1: Your Name
According to Jenn Herman from @jenns_trends, the first step to creating a good Instagram bio is making sure that your name is, in fact, your name! (By this, we mean the “name” field in your profile, not your Instagram username). People searching for you on Instagram will likely use your name or your company’s name, and consistency lets people know that the Instagram profile they’re viewing actually belongs to you and not an impostor.
This might seem pretty obvious, but there’s actually a bigger reason for it. As Jen points out, “your name and username are the only fields that Instagram considers in search queries.” As such, it’s important to make sure that the name you use in your Instagram bio is the one your followers and customers are searching for.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t spruce things up a bit! Do you have a specialty or industry niche? Do you offer a specific service? Are you known for something in particular? You can include this detail in your name as well!
Check out how Jenn Herman includes her profession in her Instagram bio name. Not only can adding a unique skill to your name help you stand out from the crowd, but it can help users search for you by your profession.
Good Instagram Bios Tip #2: Your Skills
A good Instagram bio accurately explains what your business is, and what you do. So if you want to stand out for a particular skill, profession, hobby, or interest, you should include these details in your Instagram bio as well!
Think about what sets you apart from your competitors. Do you have a unique set of skills or experiences that might be of interest to your followers? Not only will including these in your Instagram bio serve as an introduction to new viewers, but it can also determine whether they’ll follow.
Social media influencer and blogger Meg Biram is a great example of someone who includes her interests and hobbies in her bio to show off her personal side as well as her professional side.
Good Instagram Bios Tip #3: Keywords
Using keywords won’t improve your search-ability on Instagram (except, as we mentioned above, your “name” in your Instagram bio) but it will give your account more focus and help you connect with followers who want to engage with your content!
When deciding what keywords to include in your Instagram bio, try to think about both your own core values and the core values of your target audience. If you use Instagram for business, spend some time creating a “profile” of your ideal follower. What are their pain points or interests? And what keywords will help you resonate with them most?
Using keywords that target your audience and niche will help users better understand who you are, what you have to offer, and whether or not your account is relevant to them!
Check out how pop-culture writer Luvvie Ajayi uses tailored keywords in her Instagram bio to personify her brand and connect with her followers.
Good Instagram Bios Tip #4: Website Link
Unlike other social networks, Instagram is strict on where clickable links can be placed. Currently, Instagram only gives users one clickable link in the app, and it’s the link in your bio.
A lot of businesses use the link to send followers to their homepage or blog, which is great! But for ecommerce businesses that want to send followers to specific product pages, campaigns, or webinars, the lack of hot links is a huge challenge.
To get around this restriction, some businesses will frequently update their website link to send followers to their latest products or promotions — and then refer to that link in their Instagram captions. The problem is that Instagram’s photo feed is no longer chronological, so when a business’ post says “link in bio,” that link might not correspond to the actual link in their bio.
Good Instagram Bios Tip #5: Get Creative
While it’s very important to convey who you are and what you do in your Instagram bio, you should also think of it as a space for you to show off your fun side. At the end of the day, Instagram is a fairly lighthearted medium, so try not to get too stuck on drafting a formal biography!
Here are some great ways to insert creativity into your Instagram bio:
- Use emojis to space out your text
- Include your branded hashtag to promote an Instagram contest or campaign (hashtags in your bio are clickable on the web but not through the mobile app)
- Change the font in your Instagram bio with Textizer
- Add line breaks to your Instagram bio by typing “Return” in your bio on the web version of Instagram (you can’t add line breaks to your bio in the Instagram mobile app)
Check out how designer and creative Dana Fox uses different fonts and emojis to show off her personality in her Instagram bio. Her use of line breaks also makes for a nicer layout within the mobile app!
Instagram Bio Checklist
A good Instagram bio is one that creates a great first impression and convinces users to click the “follow” button on your account! Here’s a recap of what we covered:
- Explain who you are and what you do
- Target your niche audience with specific keywords
- Link to your website or blog, or use Linkin.bio to send followers to your shoppable Instagram feed
- Share your personality
- Provide a way for your followers to get in touch
These are just a few creative examples of how brands are using good Instagram bios to drive engagement and sales. Whether you decide to follow one of the styles above or do something completely different, just remember to keep the tips mentioned above in mind during the creation process!
Benjamin Chacon
Benjamin is a Content Writer at Later and recent transplant from Toronto. You can follow his day-to-day exploits on Instagram @benjaminchacs.
