Building a strong marketing team isn’t easy. A key part of sorting out marketing candidates starts with asking the right interview questions. In this post, you can find a list of marketing interview questions to ask candidates that are applying for all different types of marketing roles.

[table of contents]

[content_upgrade_shortcode]

What’s The Goal Of All These Questions?

The idea behind the questions on the following lists is to ask things that are specific to learning about a candidate’s capabilities for specific marketing functions.

Create a list of interview questions that streamline your hiring process by using CoSchedule’s Interview Question Generator!

Source

For any role, you need to know:

• How does this candidate learn best? You can’t learn marketing in college. you need to be keeping current or you’re outdated. So, it’s helpful to know how they keep themselves sharp and devise smart strategies for the company to help support them.
• Does this person understand the purpose of marketing? The goal of marketing is driving profitable customer action. It’s surprising how often candidates miss this point.
• Showing they’re a strong fit for a specific type of role: If an applicant doesn’t know what it is they are applying for (beyond a role somewhere in marketing), that might be a red flag.

Ultimately, the idea is to find people who will be the best fit for what your company needs.

15 General Marketing Interview Questions

Marketing is an extremely diverse field, and there are many types of positions and jobs that fall under the marketing department. You can ask the following marketing interview questions to for any general marketing position

1. Tell me how you got started in your career?
2. What makes you passionate about this work?
3. How has your skillset grown over time?
4. Are there skills you’d like the opportunity to develop in the future?
5. How did you learn about this open position?
6. What can you tell me about our company?
7. Why are you leaving your current position?
8. What do you consider to be your core strengths?
9. What motivates you to succeed?
10. What publications and blogs do you read?
11. What was the last book you read?
12. Who’s your favorite marketer and why?
13. In your own words, what’s the goal of marketing?
14. What’s the definition of [INSERT TERM] to you?
15. If we asked you to improve [INSERT METRIC] by [INSERT PERCENTAGE] by [INSERT DATE], what strategies and tactics would you use to achieve that goal?

20 Marketing Manager / Director Interview Questions

Good teams need good leaders. In order to hire the best leader for your marketing team, start by asking the following marketing interview questions to identify the right qualities for a manager-level position.

1. Have you managed staff before, and if so, for how long?
2. How many people reported to you?
3. Describe your leadership style.
4. Tell us about a time you helped a struggling employee succeed.
5. What is the first thing you’d do if hired for this position?
6. Tell us about a time when you were responsible for setting a strategic vision and overseeing a team to execute it. What were the results?
7. When faced with reasonable pushback from team members, how do you respond?
8. Describe a time when you were faced with a conflict in regard to decision-making and helped lead the charge toward a positive outcome.
9. How do you convince other executives about the value of marketing?
10. When marketing campaigns or projects fail, how do you respond?
11. Which metrics do you consider most important for gauging success?
12. Which marketing software platforms do you have first-hand experience with?
13. Are you comfortable using large amounts of data to guide decision-making?
14. Which channels would you say this organization should focus on? Are there any we are not using but should, or those we are using but shouldn’t, in your opinion?
15. Are you familiar with our industry?
16. Who would you guess are our biggest competitors, and what might you do to help differentiate us in the marketplace?
17. Describe a time when you had to oversee a major project from start to finish and the results it produced.
18. Talk about the most successful campaign or project you ever worked on.
19. Have you ever taken a risk on a new tactic or idea? If so, can you tell us about a time when a risk paid off?
20. Which software platforms do you prefer, and why?

10 Marketing Intern Interview Questions

Good interns can be immensely valuable when you find a motivated candidate. All of us have to start somewhere, so it’s important to be prepared when you’re trying to land an internship position. Here are some questions you can ask a marketing intern candidate.

1. What interests you in a marketing career?
2. Have you ever worked in an office before?
3. Do you have any experience working with [INSERT SOFTWARE]?
4. Is there anything in particular about our company or industry that interests you?
5. Have you had previous internships or relevant work and volunteer experience?
6. How has your college coursework prepared you to succeed in this role?
7. What would you most like to learn about marketing in your time with us?
8. Tell us about something you achieved in school that you’re proud of.
9. Ultimately, what type of position would you like to secure in the industry?
10. What do you hope to get out of an internship with us?

10 Entry-Level Marketing Interview Questions

Hiring marketers at this level is similar to adding an intern. At this point, you’re primarily looking for potential and candidates who are motivated and have a strong willingness to learn.

1. Tell us about your university and internship experiences.
2. Which skills do you have that would best fit this position?
3. Are there any areas where you feel you could improve?
4. Where would you like to see your career in three years?
5. Describe a time when you made a mistake and how you handled it.
6. What do you feel separates you from other recent graduates?
7. Can you tell us about a volunteer experience you enjoyed?
8. How would you define the goal of marketing?
9. What attracted you to this job specifically?
10. Tell me about your best friend.

20 Copywriter Interview Questions

Copywriting does not come easy to most, it is an analytical skill and is a crucial part of any marketing team. Let’s go over some questions to ask a copywriting interviewee to make sure they would be a good fit for your team.

1. Do you consider yourself a writer first, or a marketer first?
2. Tell us about a creative campaign you wrote, starting from conception to execution.
3. Are you familiar with search engine optimization?
4. In the past, how have you measured the effectiveness of your copy?
5. Is creativity or driving sales more important to you?
6. How well do you handle tight deadlines?
7. Are you comfortable with ambiguity, or do you prefer detailed creative briefs?
8. How skilled are you in adapting your writing to a brand’s voice?
9. Have you worked with designers in the past?
10. Which types of copy have you created in the past (web copy, blog posts, PPC ads, social media posts, white papers, ebooks, video scripts, etc.)?
11. Are you skilled at explaining complex ideas in language anyone can understand?
12. Who are some of your favorite writers?
13. What’s the best ad you’ve ever seen, and what did you appreciate about it?
14. Tell us about an effective campaign you planned and executed.
15. What’s your top tip for handling a difficult client?
16. Are you able to produce clean copy without much editing?
17. How much time do you spend writing headlines for a typical piece?
18. Do you consider yourself more of a technical writer or creative writer?
19. Do you have experience developing and using personas?
20. How comfortable are you with interpreting creative briefs?

5 Product Marketing Interview Questions

Product marketers need strong copywriting skills, and must understand the product development cycles and how to angle it to their target audience. Here are some questions you can ask a product marketing interviewee.

1. How familiar are you with our product?
2. How would you market an existing feature of our product?
3. How would you position [INSERT PRODUCT] to a millennial audience? How would you market that same product to a baby boomer audience?
4. If presented with a new product or feature to market, where would you start your research?
5. Are you comfortable interviewing experts to learn about subjects you need to write about?

10 PR Interview Questions

When you’re interviewing a PR candidate, some important characteristics they should encompass are outgoing, extroverted, and personable. Here are some questions to ask a PR interviewee to make sure they fit the mold.

1. What attracts you to PR specifically?
2. How comfortable are you talking to new people?
3. Do you have experience working with the media?
4. How would you pitch [INSERT PRODUCT] to a journalist at [INSERT NEWS OUTLET]?
5. Which news sources, blogs, and media outlets do you follow in our niche?
6. Are you able to stay calm under pressure?
7. Tell us about a time when you had to de-escalate the conversation during a crisis.
8. How much experience do you have planning PR strategies?
9. What are your thoughts on using content marketing and social media for PR?
10. What do you feel is the true purpose and value of PR?

15 Graphic Design Interview Questions

Here’s a tip: never ask a designer if they can make something “pop.” Ask these questions instead.

1. Describe your design process for starting new projects.
2. In your own words, what do you think quality design should achieve?
3. Have you worked as part of a marketing team before?
4. How do you respond to feedback and criticism?
5. What are your top three brands design-wise?
6. When stakeholders or clients don’t understand something about your design, how do you explain your decision-making?
7. How much guidance do you like to have before starting design on a project?
8. Are you comfortable collaborating with other team members, like copywriters and project managers?
9. Are you capable of turning around quality work on tight timelines?
10. Tell us about a time you missed a deadline (it happens sometimes) and how you handled it.
11. Tell us about your favorite project you’ve ever worked on, and what you enjoyed about it.
12. Who are your design heroes?
13. What was the creative energy like at your last place of work (stagnant, restricting or open, agile, inviting, etc.)?
14. Which niche within the design industry are you most excited about (illustration, branding, animation, etc.)?
15. When it comes to design, do you consider creativity or effectiveness to be more important?

20 Social Media Marketing Interview Questions

Narrow down candidates who actually know how to do marketing on social (rather than just know a lot about social media) with this list of inquiries:

1. Do you have a strong grasp on basic marketing principles?
2. How would you rate your creative writing skills?
3. Which social media channels do you have the most expertise with?
4. Do you have experience with audience research?
5. Which social media content types do you have experience creating?
6. Have you ever been tasked with running a social media campaign, from ideation to execution to measurement? And if so, what were the results?
7. Do you have previous experience managing online communities?
8. Have you reviewed our business’s social media presence? If so, are there any specific things you’d recommend changing?
9. Tell us about a time you were confronted with a social media crisis, and how you handled it.
10. Which metrics do you consider most important for measuring social media success?
11. Which blogs and news sources do you read to stay on top of social media trends and changes?
12. How familiar are you with running contests on Facebook without running afoul of that platform’s guidelines?
13. Do you have experience blending organic and paid social strategies?
14. Which social media platforms are your favorite for personal use?
15. What’s your opinion on using social media for customer service?
16. Are you familiar with Facebook’s guidelines on promotional posts?
17. Which social media marketing and management tools have you used in the past, and which have been your favorites?
18. What are your favorite brands on social media and what, in particular, do you think they do well?
19. In your own opinion, what can social media do to impact business outcomes that other channels and tactics can’t deliver as well?
20. Do you have experience managing a social media calendar?

20 Content Strategist Interview Questions

Content strategists will typically plan, develop, and manage content for websites and other digital media platforms. These questions will help you find a strategist who fits what you need.

1. In your own terms, how would you define content strategy?
2. What do you think separates excellent content from average work?
3. Describe your process for generating new content ideas?
4. Have you ever conducted a content audit?
5. How would you rate your knowledge of search engine optimization?
6. Would you describe your writing style as more clear, or more complex?
7. What types of industries and businesses have you worked with previously?
8. Which types of content do you have the most experience with (websites, blog posts, video, social media, etc.)?
9. Tell us about a content project that went wrong and how you recovered from the experience.
10. Do you prefer strategic planning or executing work yourself?
11. Are you better at tackling big-picture problems or handling deeply detailed tasks?
12. Tell me about the last book you read.
13. What sorts of side projects do you do outside of work?
14. Are you familiar with how to use a CMS and common content marketing software?
15. Define the difference between voice and tone.
16. Can you describe your editing process?
17. How do you measure the effectiveness of content?
18. How would you approach content planning for a new website project?
19. Do you have a basic knowledge of UX?
20. Are you comfortable with presenting ideas, concepts, and campaigns to clients/internal stakeholders?

15 Marketing Analyst Interview Questions

A marketing analyst does a lot of research, analysis, and forecasting in order to be successful. That being said, here are some questions you can ask your interviewee to see if they fit the role.

1. Explain the difference between causation and correlation when it comes to marketing activity and results.
2. Explain the difference between, and importance of, qualitative and quantitative research.
3. When presented with a large amount of data to analyze, where do you start?
4. Tell us about a time where you had to explain the meaning and relevance of complex data to an audience unfamiliar with data analysis.
5. Which tools do you prefer for gathering marketing data?
6. How much do you know about predictive modeling and analytics?
7. Do you have a specific story you can share about a time where you found a particularly interesting data-driven insight, and it make a substantial impact on a business?
8. How do you respond when you’re asked to figure something out under a tight time constraint?
9. Describe your level of comfort and experience with data visualization.
10. Have you used a CRM before, and if so, how would you describe your level of expertise with using one effectively?
11. When a team member struggles to understand complex data, how do you help them grasp your insights?
12. Have you produced reports before, and if so, what do you think makes a marketing report most useful?
13. When management wants to move in one direction, but data says the team should go another way, how do you approach that conversation?
14. How skilled are you in challenging your own assumptions?
15. What sorts of processes or techniques do you follow to separate meaningful insights from all the noise in large data sets?

20 SEO Interview Questions

SEO is very much alive and well, and spans a diverse set of skills and disciplines. Ask these questions when you’re trying to find the perfect SEO candidate.

1. What is the purpose of search engine optimization in your own words?
2. Do you have experience with front-end development?
3. Are your specialties primarily in on-site, off-site, or technical SEO?
4. Describe your typical keyword research process.
5. Have you ever encountered a website that received a manual penalty from Google? If so, how did you approach resolving the issue?
6. Have you ever made a major mistake with SEO? If so, what happened, and how did you correct the issue?
7. If you had to build an SEO strategy from scratch, where would you start?
8. What the most important trends you see developing for SEO over the next six to 12 months?
9. Tell us about a time where you successfully increased a website’s traffic to a significant degree using your SEO skills.
10. How do you learn new tactics and information regarding SEO?
11. Do you have experience combining both organic and paid search strategies?
12. When compromises need to be made between content, UX, and SEO, how do you approach tough conversations to ensure the application of SEO best practices without hurting other aspects of the site and business?
13. How important do you consider search engines other than Google for SEO?
14. Do you know how to properly apply rel=canonical tags?
15. Tell us about a time where you needed to drive major SEO improvements with limited resources, and how you achieved your goal.
16. Do you understand how to properly use 301 and 302 status codes?
17. Do the words “Panda,” “Penguin,” and “Hummingbird” mean anything to you?
18. Do you know how to structure content to capture Featured Snippets?
19. How familiar are you with the various elements of a typical search engine result page on Google?
20. Which ranking signal do you consider most important to focus on?

20 Outside-Of-The-Box Interview Questions

Yes, technical skills are important to ask any job candidate, but so are the creative, personality-type questions. Start asking these unique questions to any candidate to learn more about them.

1. If you were a television character, who would you be, and why?
2. What would the book about your life story be called?
3. You can choose one superpower. Which would you choose, and why?
4. Do you care more about things or experiences?
5. What’s your biggest personal goal outside of work?
6. When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
7. If I asked your best friend to describe you, what would they say?
8. In 60 seconds, tell us how many things you can do with a paperclip.
9. On a scale from 1 to 10, how would you rate your level of weirdness?
10. If you had the choice between being rich or being happy, which would you choose, and why?
11. Name five albums you’d take with you, if you had to live on a desert island.
12. If you could interview one famous person from history, who would you choose and why?
13. What would you do with your time if you didn’t need to worry about money?
14. If you were going to start your own business, what would you do, and why?
15. What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you on the job and how did you handle it?
16. How would you approach selling a ketchup-flavored popsicle?
17. If we gave you $100 to make a customer’s day, what would you do with it?
18. If you could change one thing about this interview, what would you change?
19. What’s the most unconventional solution to a problem you’ve ever come up with at work?
20. If you’re faced with something you want to do, and something you need to do, which task would you tackle first?

Assessing An Interviewee’s Answers

Say a candidate appears to nail the interview. That’s it, they’re hired, right? Not quite. Follow a few tips to read between the lines and accurately assess an interviewee’s questions.

Look Closely At Work Samples

In addition to what a candidate says they can do, look at what they’ve actually done. Ask to see some samples and cross-reference what they said they’ve done, with their real output.

Get References

Similarly, take the time to call references. If someone is good at what they do, they’ll be more than willing to tell you what makes them worth hiring.

Ask the following questions:

• How do you know [CANDIDATE]?
• Have you worked with [CANDIDATE] before?
• How would you describe their strengths and weaknesses?
• Has [CANDIDATE] ever been promoted before?
• How would you rate this person’s communication skills?
• Do you know why [CANDIDATE] may have left a previous position?

Beware Of Red Flags

If a candidate seems deficient in certain skills or otherwise doesn’t feel like a good fit, carefully consider how much you can compensate for, and whether or not someone just can’t cut it. Remember the statistic from early in this post: a mis-hire can cost you five times that person’s salary.

Keep Your Team Organized With CoSchedule Calendar Products

Once your team is assembled, CoSchedule’s calendar software is the best platform to keep your team organized.

• View your entire marketing strategy on one calendar.
• Managing team collaboration and workflows.
• Use AI for a project and social assistant to write first-draft content in seconds.
• Automating publishing for blog posts, social media campaigns, and email newsletters. Plus, it integrates with tons of other tools and software platforms.

Over 100,000 marketers use CoSchedule across the following types of organizations (and more):

• In-house marketing teams.
• Agencies.
• Small businesses.
• Solopreneurs (and even if you work solo, you may still have collaborators or team members.
• Universities.

Sign up for your Free Calendar today!

This blog post was originally written by Ben Sailer in 2018. It was revised in December 2023 with contributions by Brier Gurholt.

CoSchedule has hosted many demos with Sprout Social customers looking to for a viable alternative due to recent price increases.

But finding the right replacement can be overwhelming. CoSchedule Marketing Suite includes must-have social media management tools plus many other features to help marketers organize all of their marketing in one place.

If you’re ready to see Marketing Suite in action, schedule your demo now. 🙂
[Table Of Contents]

Why Choose CoSchedule Marketing Suite Over Sprout Social

CoSchedule Marketing Suite is a powerful marketing software that brings your team, process, & projects – including social media management – into one tool. The comprehensive content calendar and robust social media tools provide better visibility and workflow management than Sprout Social’s capabilities.

With Marketing Suite, you can easily see all your projects and tasks as scheduled

The following information is meant to help you understand how CoSchedule Marketing Suite compares to Sprout Social as a viable alternative:

Robust Social Media Publishing Integrations

Sprout Social is heavily used for social media planning and publishing.

CoSchedule Marketing Suite includes social media scheduling and publishing for the industry’s most popular social media networks.

To help marketers get started with Marketing Suite quickly, we have an easy-to-use bulk import tool. You can import many social media messages from a spreadsheet to your Calendar in seconds.

Bulk import options are available for content and projects outside of social messages, too.

And should you ever need to pause social publishing from your calendar, Marketing Suite also features a “stop” button called Pause Social Media Sending.

Best Time Scheduling For Better Engagement

Love using Optimal Send Times to schedule messages in Sprout Social?

Best time scheduling serves as a viable alternative to Sprout Social’s optimal send times

CoSchedule Marketing Suite features a similar tool called Best Time Scheduling that allows you to publish messages at the optimal time for engagement.

Cross-Functional Marketing Calendar

The Calendar in Marketing Suite gives you global visibility of your projects, campaigns, and social messages in a single publishing calendar.

The Calendar makes it easy to proactively plan weeks, months, quarters, or even a year in advance.

Best of all, it features drag-and-drop rescheduling, so you can quickly adjust timelines for social campaigns, projects, and events when priorities change.

Social Media Automation Tools

Similar to Sprout Social’s Sprout Queue, CoSchedule Marketing Suite includes a social media automation tool called ReQueue.

ReQueue automatically publishes messages across your social channels for you. With ReQueue, you can consistently fill in the gaps in your social schedule by resharing top-performing evergreen content.

AI Social Assistant

CoSchedule Marketing Suite includes multiple AI tools to help you create a more engaging social media strategy.

The first AI tool is Mia, CoSchedule’s Marketing Intelligence Assistant. Chat with Mia, and she can help generate ideas and content in seconds.

Utilize CoSchedule’s Social Assistant for ideas

Mia also features an AI prompt library that features over 500+ AI marketing prompts you can use to create high-quality content for your marketing strategy in less time.

Writing social messages?

You can even use Social Assistant to craft social messages

The social message composer includes an AI Social Assistant. Share a link or topic of your message, and your AI Social Assistant will generate social message copy for you.

Social Media Campaigns

Want to promote an event, campaign, or new content? Marketing Suite makes it easy to group together related social media posts with Social Campaigns.

This way, you may apply a Status to the series of posts at the Project level. This empowers you to write and approve a campaign of social messages as a whole unit rather than individual posts to save time.

Easily reschedule your tasks by dragging it to another date

Best of all, if timelines change, you can reschedule the entire series of messages in seconds with drag-and-drop rescheduling.

Social Media Analytics

Like Sprout Social, CoSchedule includes a series Social Media Reports, including:

• Social Engagement Reports give you a high-level overview of your entire social strategy in a single report.
• Social Campaign Reports measure the success of specific campaigns and intiatives.
• Social Profile Reports analyze the best times, days, and message types for each profile across your social channels.

Each report in CoSchedule Marketing Suite can be customized to measure and analyze your social performance.

Other Popular Integrations In Marketing Suite

In addition to social media integrations, Marketing Suite connects with Google Workplace products.

This empowers your team to create, edit, comment, and approve content in progress easily:

• Google Docs
• Google Sheets
• Google Slides
• Google Analytics

If you’re a Microsoft shop, Marketing Suite connects with OneDrive, too.

If you’re creating content for other marketing channels outside of social media, Marketing Suite also includes integrations for:

• WordPress
• HubSpot
• ActiveCampaign
• Mailchimp
• Campaign Monitor
• And more!

Marketing Projects & Campaigns

CoSchedule Marketing Suite allows you to customize all of the types of content you want to see on your content calendar.

So whether it’s Social Campaigns, Blog Posts, Emails, or maybe something more specific to your organization like Product Announcements, you can create and define these easily.

You can even create Marketing Campaigns to group related projects for a cleaner view of progress and timelines.

Unlike Sprout Social, CoSchedule Marketing Suite is a complete content calendar for social media, content marketing, email marketing, and beyond.

More Reasons To Consider This Sprout Social Alternative

CoSchedule Marketing Suite also includes many other features and dashboards to help marketers organize all their marketing in one place, including:

• Multiple Calendars – Create multiple calendars for specific teams, departments, or initiatives.
• Request Forms – Streamline your project intake process with custom, shareable forms.
• Approval Workflows – Add required approvals to your workflows to make sure everything meets standards before publishing.
• Team Management – Delegate, assign, and reassign work via the Team Dashboard to effectively manage your team’s priorities.
•  Kanban Boards – Manage work through every stage of the creative process with customizable Kanban Boards.
• Digital Asset Management – Store, index, and share your content with built-in content library.

Plus so much more.

Get a breakdown of the top features in CoSchedule’s Calendar plans on our pricing page.

Schedule your demo to get a full tour of CoSchedule Marketing Suite today.

When most folks think about marketing, output comes to mind. Finished blog posts, ads, and campaigns take center stage.

But, if you’ve ever done marketing yourself, you know that output is just the tip of the iceberg. Most work goes into input — the planning and communication that ensure quality output. Marketing management is one aspect of this input that keeps everything running smoothly.

Effective marketing management software automates and organizes the process to save time and add clarity. Based on years of experience, we selected 30 software to keep you on top of your work.

[table of contents]

[content_upgrade_shortcode]

1. CoSchedule Marketing Suite

CoSchedule Marketing Suite

CoSchedule Marketing Suite is a family of the following four products that achieve many of the marketing management software features we covered:

2. CoSchedule Social Calendar

CoSchedule Social Calendar lets you schedule all your marketing projects on a single calendar, including social media posts for publishing. Social Calendar offers powerful project scheduling and helps you save even more time with additional collaboration and automation features.

3. Plannuh

Plannuh

The operational marketing management app Plannuh lets you plan campaigns, manage your budget, and measure your marketing performance. It automates the financial aspects of marketing for easy comparison with your marketing plan and operations. By letting you oversee your marketing plan and budget in the same place, Plannuh makes resource management much more straightforward.

4. ClickUp

ClickUp

ClickUp is a multi-purpose project management software that you can tailor to marketing using existing or custom templates. Add your marketing projects and tasks, then slot them into a timeline for smoother project management. Then, use the built-in collaboration features to comment on assignments and proof documents.

5. TeamGantt

Team Gannt

As its name suggests, TeamGantt organizes your work into a dynamic Gantt chart. The Gantt chart format places all of a project’s steps into an ongoing timeline. TeamGantt kicks that visualization up a notch with features like commenting, task dependencies, and resource management.

6. Monday

Monday

Monday combines project and task management with document collaboration to serve as a headquarters for your daily operations. This software has multiple views, including calendars, tables, and Gantt charts. You can also connect over 100 app integrations to sync projects and collaborate on files.

7. Jira

Jira

Based on agile project management, Jira’s roots lie in bug and project tracking for developers. After the software’s expansion into other markets, marketers can use Jira for product marketing and detailed work management. Plus, it has a generous free plan for small teams.

8. Trello

Trello

If you like kanban boards, you’ll love Trello. This app organizes projects and tasks into cards on a board that you can swap around according to their status. Trello’s “power-ups” let you connect apps, add features, and change views to make your board truly yours.

9. Zoom

Zoom

Zoom is a video conferencing app with a free base plan, making it accessible to small businesses and personal users. If you really want to invest in your collaboration options, you can opt for a paid plan with features like mail, a calendar, cloud storage, and caption translation.

10. Slack

Slack

Marketing teams use Slack to meet and discuss over text. This software excels at instant messaging and asynchronous collaboration because of its customizable channels. But remember that you’ll need a paid plan if you want a long-term archive of your messages.

11. Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams incorporates video meetings, group chats, online calls, and document collaboration into one software. Its features are geared towards internal collaboration over text, voice, and video. While it only offers paid plans, it has cheaper plans than Zoom and integrates with Microsoft 365’s apps.

12. BambooHR

BambooHR

BambooHR is a people management app that handles the entire employee experience. You can manage employee records, oversee the hiring process, onboard new team members, and track your team’s work time. Think of this software as a jack-of-all-trades for your people ops workflow.

13. 15five

15Five

While BambooHR covers various aspects of the employee experience, 15five revolves around employee engagement and performance. The tools in the 15five family gather employee feedback, guide performance reviews, manage employee growth goals, and help managers grow their skills.

14. Google Workspace

Google Workspace

Google Workspace comprises Google’s most popular document management and collaboration apps — Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Docs, and Google Meet. While its core apps are free by default, you can pay for a Google Workspace plan to connect them through custom email, dedicated cloud storage, and user management.

15. Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365

The software originally available under the Microsoft Office umbrella, plus some new friends, is now available in one bundle as Microsoft 365. This package includes Word, Excel, and Powerpoint for creating fundamental office documents and other popular Microsoft products like OneDrive. If you’re also interested in Teams, every Microsoft 365 plan includes it as well.

16. Adobe Creative Cloud

Adobe Creative Cloud

Adobe Creative Cloud includes Adobe’s software for photo editing, digital illustration, animation, and video editing, such as Photoshop and Premiere. These apps are some of the most well-known and used creative tech worldwide. Keep in mind that Adobe charges an early cancellation fee for its annual plan if you aren’t sure how long you want to commit to it.

17. GoVisually

GoVisually

GoVisually’s proofing platform allows marketers to collaborate with designers to add markups and annotations to designs. It also lets you review and compare revisions to give you complete control over the proofing process. If you manage marketing for an agency, this software also includes client collaboration features for easier review.

18. GoProof

GoProof

With GoProof, you can oversee the entire creative collaboration process from brief to final version. In addition to proofing features, it provides creative brief templates and intake forms to ensure marketers and designers have the same vision in mind. GoProof also has an Adobe integration that delivers proofing features directly in apps like Photoshop.

19. Red Marker

Red Marker

Think of Red Marker as a spell check, but instead of looking for spelling errors, it evaluates your marketing compliance. This software looks out for phrasing in your marketing materials that could cause legal issues.

20. Litmus

Litmus

Litmus enables you to design and manage an email marketing campaign from the ground up. After you create an email in Litmus, you can analyze its performance, test different versions, and collaborate with others on your design.

21. WordPress

WordPress

WordPress offers an online content management system (CMS) and a downloadable option to add to your self-hosted website. Using the WordPress CMS, you can add content to your website, customize its appearance, and manage its functionality.

(Quick disclaimer: I also write for WordPress.com, but I was not involved in the decision to include WordPress on this list.)

22. HubSpot

HubSpot

Looking for software to help you manage multiple channels and teams? HubSpot provides interconnected software for marketing, sales, customer service, and operations. Its marketing capabilities include automation, a CMS, email campaign management, and social media management.

23. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign automates marketing, email marketing, and sales. Use its email campaign, marketing automation, and sales tools together to create a smooth customer experience. This software also includes landing pages and forms for further customer engagement.

24. Mailchimp

MailChimp

If you’ve heard of Mailchimp, you might associate it with email only, but it also offers marketing automation and social media management. Many of its newer features use AI to offer suggestions for improving your content.

25. SproutSocial

SproutSocial

SproutSocial serves as an all-in-one social media management tool. In addition to the scheduling, publishing, and analytics features you’d expect, it offers a managed DM inbox and social listening. Plus, its employee advocacy tools provide resources that help your team members share your social content.

26. Aprimo

Aprimo

With Aprimo, you can manage your marketing assets in the context of your current projects and budget. Aprimo provides asset, project, and budget management tools you can use individually or together.

27. Google Drive

Google Drive

Whether on its own or as part of Google Workspace, Google Drive stores files and offers collaboration tools. If you don’t have any special security considerations, you can use Google Drive as-is for free. For added security, invest in a Google Workspace plan that includes Drive.

28. Dropbox

Dropbox

Dropbox provides encrypted cloud document storage in its base product. You can also add other Dropbox products for document signing, transfer, and backup. The free plan caps at 2GB of storage, so most teams must invest in a paid tier.

29. Google Analytics

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool for measuring and reporting your website performance. It tracks data like page visits and visitor behavior to help you understand what content resonates with your customers the most.

30. Heap

Heap

If you want to capture your typical customer’s journey on your website, Heap offers the tools for it. This software walks you through the actions your customers take on your website with its Session Replay feature. The Illuminate feature points out parts of your website that might be holding your visitors back from taking action and suggests how to change them.

31. Wrike

Wrike

Wrike is a project management tool that offers seamless automated workflow planning, data visualization, and resource allocation. Customizable templates, reportable features, and detailed analytics using Wrike Analyze, makes Wrike stand out amongst their competitors.

32. Asana

Asana

Asana handles all of a business’s product and project management in a single software. Asana provides a wide variety of features built to support any size business. With the use of real-time reporting, Asana Intelligence, and Kanban boards to track your work, your team is sure to find and cut the dead weight and thrive.

33. Basecamp

Basecamp

Basecamp serves as an all-in-one project management software. Implementing Basecamp’s features ensures smooth sailing and strong communication from start to finish throughout your projects. Schedule on time, chat in real-time, and organize big time.

What Is Marketing Management?

Marketing management oversees a business’s practical application of marketing to ensure it aligns with business goals. A marketing manager supervises and organizes these elements of marketing:

What Is Marketing Management Software?

Marketing management software is a set of tools that help the user perform marketing management activities effectively through functions like:

What Makes Great Marketing Management Software?

What went into our decision to include the software on this list? These factors come into play:

Here’s Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto, explaining how effective checklists are for ensuring work gets completed right the first time, every time (using surgery as an example):

If checklists are good enough for surgeons to prevent people from dying during operations, then checklists are good enough for marketers to do great work the first time around, too.

[table of contents]

[content_upgrade_shortcode]

What Is A Marketing Checklist?

Marketing Campaign Checklists

As Megan Jeromchek notes in her comprehensive piece covering marketing campaign management:

In short, a marketing campaign is made up of multiple marketing projects.

For example, a webinar marketing campaign is often made up of projects like landing pages, presentation decks, emails, social media posts, advertisements, and more. A marketing campaign checklist documents all of these projects to help managers clearly monitor and control campaign progress.

A marketing campaign checklist is the complete set of all projects within a single campaign that must be published over a specific period of time.

Marketing Project Checklists

As I wrote about in a complete guide to marketing project management:

Marketing project checklists are simply task lists of the work needed to create a single piece of content.

For example, an article checklist could look like this:

• Choose a topic that interests your audience
• Do preliminary research (Google, Reddit, etc.)
• Define the goals of the article
• Define your target audience
• Research keywords to target
• Understand search intent
• Begin the article outline
• Write 25 title ideas (choose the best one)
• Write headings and subheadings of the article (H2s, H3s, etc.).
• Research competing content in Google
• Document where you’ll add internal links
• Document extra resources like links to PDFs, reports, etc. to include in content upgrades
• Write an interesting introduction
• Conclude on a high note
• Revise your first draft
• Delete all fluff
• Break long blocks of text
• Optimize your article for SEO
• Stage your article in a CMS
• Schedule article to publish

It’s a simple marketing task list to ensure nothing important gets missed.

How to create your own marketing checklists:

1. Break down your marketing campaign into a list of projects.
2. List all of the tasks per project type.
3. Estimate the level of effort you spend on each project task.
4. Determine which project tasks are necessary (and which ones aren’t).
5. Establish contributor roles and responsibilities.
6. Set task due dates and deadlines.
7. Organize tasks as marketing checklists.

Step 1: Break Down Your Marketing Campaign Into A List Of Projects

The point of creating a marketing campaign checklist is to break down one campaign into all of the projects you’ll create.

For example, if CoSchedule’s campaign is an educational course, our team may need to create the following content projects to make sure the campaign successfully influences our marketing goals:

• Campaign launch brief and talking points: An internal document that explains the goal, target audience, what the project is, and how you’ll market the campaign.
• Brand brief: Since you’re creating multiple pieces, your designers may need a way to ensure the campaign’s visual identity is consistent. This can also apply to writers by setting expectations for your brand voice.
• Signup landing page: This is the page where you’ll direct all promotional traffic.
• Lesson pages: These are the actual course material, and there will likely be multiple to create.
• Lesson videos: Some courses opt for visual content to include on every lesson page.
• Lesson quizzes: True courses teach, so you may want to quiz or test your students on every lesson page.
• Workshop decks: Most courses have live-action training that includes speaking points and a deck, like a webinar.
• Certificates: Consider creating certificates for the students who pass all quizzes.
• Facebook group: This provides a way for students to collaborate and build community around your brand.
• Emails: You will promote the course to your email list. This will likely be more than one email to plan, write, and schedule.
• Social media campaign: You will share the course with all of your social media followers.
• Facebook ads: This is a way to reach a larger audience than those who already follow you.
• Blog post: Use your blog as a marketing channel to promote your course.

In this example, you see how a large campaign breaks down into many pieces of content projects. You will do the same thing for your highest-priority campaign. Download the Marketing Campaign Checklist spreadsheet template (located after the introduction of this page):

Column A already has some content ideas listed to help you kick-start your campaign planning process. Tweak as you see fit and add your own content ideas.

You’ll note column A is split into four distinct sections: Project Prep, Pre-Promotion, Launch, and Post Launch. Often, this helps with campaign timeline management because you know which pieces need to be completed before others. Again, if you find these categories don’t apply to your campaign, tweak the template as you see fit.

Add your project ideas to column A.

Step 2: List All Of The Tasks Per Project Type

Figuring out what needs to be done to complete a project can help you identify which tasks are vital (and which are unnecessary) and build consistency into your checklists.

To do this, think hard and start from the beginning. Here’s a hypothetical example of what tasks you might need to do when writing a blog post:

• Perform keyword research
• Do topical research
• Write 20-25 headline options
• Write an outline
• Write an introduction
• Write the body content
• Write conclusion
• Design visual content
• Add downloadable content
• Proofread and copy-edit post
• Format post content for on-page SEO

Step 3: Estimate The Level Of Effort You Spend On Each Project Task

When you’ve executed a checklist enough times (whether writing a blog post or something else), you start to roughly understand how long each task in that process takes. But accurately estimating time for marketing tasks can still be difficult. So, what’s the solution?

Try tracking your time using a time-tracking app. Toggl and Harvest are two quality options. The way they work is simple: Press “start” to begin tracking time when you start a task, and then press pause when you take a break or wrap it up.

Then, track your time for how long all those tasks take. You can do this with a simple spreadsheet that looks something like this:

It doesn’t need to be anything complicated. Just list your projects and how much time you spent on each task. Two columns could be enough to serve this purpose (and the easier you make things, the more likely you are to actually stick with it). In the future, this will help you understand how long they take more accurately.

I find it’s easiest to think of time spent in days. How many days does it take to complete each specific task? From there, you can determine how long it will actually take to complete the entire checklist from start to finish.

Step 4: Determine Which Project Tasks Are Necessary (& Which Ones Aren’t)

When you work through this process, you might discover you’re spending time on tasks that aren’t necessary or things that you might be able to do better another way.

When in doubt, ask yourself a few questions:

• Could I complete this project without following this task? If so, cut it out.
• Can this task be consolidated into another task? This might make writing your checklist more simple and easy to follow.
• If a task takes too long, can I make it more efficient? This is an open-ended question, but it’s worth thinking about why tasks might take too long.

This will help you narrow the tasks in each project checklist down to the most essential ones.

Also, consider adding tasks to your checklist to empower marketing handoffs:

• How will approvals work for each contributor?
• How will work pass along through the content supply chain with handoffs?
• What are your expectations for time needs for these tasks?

Step 5: Establish Contributor Roles & Responsibilities

It’s time to understand who will help you complete the tasks in the content project checklist:

• Who will help you complete the work in this checklist?
• What do you expect each contributor to do?
• Who needs to be involved in making time commitment expectations?

Here’s an example of what the blog post checklist mentioned earlier might look like with assignees added:

• Perform keyword research (SEO Strategist)
• Do topical research (Content Strategist)
• Write 20-25 headline options (Content Writer)
• Write an outline (Content Writer)
• Write an introduction (Content Writer)
• Write the body content (Content Writer)
• Write conclusion (Content Writer)
• Design visual content (Graphic Designer)
• Add downloadable content (Graphic Designer / Content Writer)
• Proofread and copy-edit post (Content Editor).
• Format post content for on-page SEO (SEO Strategist).

In some cases, it might be obvious who in your marketing department is responsible for a specific task. But what do you do when it’s not clear, and what do you do about tasks that could be delegated?

How you delegate tasks will depend on your marketing team’s structure, which roles you have on staff, and your number of marketing employees. While this makes it challenging to generalize who might do what at different levels of seniority, a basic hierarchy of responsibility might look like this:

However, this simple, traditional breakdown of responsibility isn’t without problems. A better way to structure and delegate tasks is to align team members’ strengths and experiences with the most impactful tasks they can take on.

Since this one project may not be the only thing each team member is working on, that doesn’t necessarily mean steps will be completed at the exact time the previous one is finished.

Step 6: Set Task Due Dates & Deadlines

Use those time estimates to map out realistic deadlines for every task. That way, checklist contributors will know how much time in their day to allocate to the project and which day of the week their tasks are due.

Deadlines Relative To Project Publish Date

Here’s that same blog post example one more time, with deadlines added relative to when the blog post will publish:

• Perform keyword research (SEO Strategist): 30 Days Before Publish
• Do topical research (Content Strategist): 27 Days Before Publish
• Write 20-25 headline options (Content Writer): 25 Days Before Publish
• Write an outline (Content Writer): 25 Days Before Publish
• Write an introduction (Content Writer): 25 Days Before Publish
• Write the body content (Content Writer): 25 Days Before Publish
• Write conclusion (Content Writer): 25 Days Before Publish
• Design visual content (Graphic Designer): 18 Days Before Publish
• Add downloadable content (Graphic Designer / Content Writer): 18 Days Before Publish
• Proofread and copy edit post (Content Editor): 16 Days Before Publish
• Format post content for on-page SEO (SEO Strategist): 15 Days Before Publish

This task timeline gets all the work done with a full two weeks of lead time in case something comes up (something always comes up) and progress gets derailed. You can set this in any way that makes sense for you.

Deadlines Relative To Project Start Date

Another way to set task deadlines is to start with when work begins and move forward from there (rather than working backward from a publishing or shipping deadline). Here’s an example of what this might look like:

• Perform keyword research (SEO Strategist): Project Start
• Do topical research (Content Strategist): 3 Days After Start
• Write 20-25 headline options (Content Writer): 5 Days After Start
• Write an outline (Content Writer): 5 Days After Start
• Write an introduction (Content Writer): 5 Days After Start
• Write the body content (Content Writer): 5 Days After Start
• Write conclusion (Content Writer): 5 Days After Start
• Design visual content (Graphic Designer): 12 Days After Start
• Add downloadable content (Graphic Designer / Content Writer): 12 Days After Start
• Proofread and copy edit post (Content Editor): 14 Days After Start
• Format post content for on-page SEO (SEO Strategist): 15 Days After Start

This takes effectively the same amount of time, but it offers another way of thinking about how task deadlines are applied to the checklist. Planning your checklist’s deadlines by start date provides more room for flexibility as needed (e.g., sickness, unexpected absences, etc.).

Step 7: Organize Tasks As Marketing Checklists

Once you have your tasks mapped out, it’s time to build them into actual checklists.

There are a lot of different ways you can create marketing checklists.

You can build checklists with Google Docs (which also integrates with CoSchedule Marketing Suite and Marketing Calendar).

You can build your marketing checklists with the spreadsheet-based checklist template you can download in the introduction of this article.

You can also build marketing checklists for your projects with Task Templates in CoSchedule Marketing Suite or Marketing Calendar. This feature is designed specifically for marketing use cases, making building marketing checklists and automating workflows easy.

With Task Templates in CoSchedule Marketing Suite, you can create easy checklist templates to set up and manage your marketing workflows within one marketing software suite.

When you create a new Task Template, you’ll be given the option to create a Task Template with dates relative to the project start date or the project ship date:

Give your Task Template a name and add tasks. This will create a simple marketing checklist.

You can also schedule due dates and add assignees to each task in your checklist:

Continue until you’ve created a checklist with every task, deadline, and assignee in the process.

Then, when you add projects to CoSchedule Marketing Suite, you can apply the appropriate Task Template to keep your checklist management consistent.

A checklist is a power move – it guarantees every project is done correctly the first time, every time.

Below are a series of checklists in a variety of marketing areas. So, whether you’re a writer, designer, or project manager, there’s something useful for you here.

Remember, these are just a starting point, so add, delete, or edit any task to make it work for you.

1. Marketing Plan Checklist

Aligning all marketing activities with the company’s vision, mission, and strategic business objectives, can be difficult. Here’s a complex marketing plan broken down into 10 simple steps:

• Complete a SWOT analysis
• Assess the target market
• Conduct a competitive market analysis
• Consider the 4 Ps of Marketing
• Define an objective for your team
• Set SMART goals
• Create a keyword spreadsheet
• Establish success metrics
• Delegate tasks to appropriate team members
• And begin content planning!

2. Content Marketing Checklist

Generally, content marketing has five main steps: Market research, target audience determination, content creation, content promotion, and an afterword analysis. These can be simplified into an easy-to-follow checklist:

• Identify consumer needs
• Perform keyword research
• Complete a competitive market analysis
• Set a deadline and budget
• Decide on format

3. Social Media Checklist

Campaigns come up frequently in social media, so following a simple process is vital for success.

The following social media checklist will help do just that.

• Research new trends and content ideas
• Review target audience and determine platform
• Establish SMART goals
• Shoot or design visual content
• Write post copy
• Select hashtags
• Proofread and edit
• Set KPIs
• Upload message into a publishing tool (CoSchedule Marketing Calendar)
• Schedule
• Measure results

4. Blog Post Checklist

Writing a blog post and looking for a place to start? Check off the following tasks to lay the foundation for an awesome blog post:

• Perform keyword research
• Identify core and secondary keywords based on relevancy, search volume, and competitiveness

• Identify an audience
• Draft an outline
• Write in simple sentences
• Use relevant images and videos
• Do internal linking
• Add a CTA
• Check content readability
• Proofread and edit
• Publish and promote

5. On-Page SEO Checklist

Generating organic search traffic can be difficult, but let’s break it down into a list of actionable steps:

• Perform keyword research
• Craft a quality title tag

• Separate sections via header tags

• Optimize images

• Link external sources
• Create a concise meta description
• Write a meaningful URL slug
• Check content readability
• Keyword is prominent throughout content

6. Proofreading & Editing Checklist

Proofreading is an essential step to correct errors, fix inconsistencies, and improve the overall quality of a written piece. Additionally, errors are often distracting and lower business credibility.

Help people focus on the message, not the mistakes, by checking off these content editing elements:

The content . . .

• Follows brand guidelines
• Aligns with a marketing strategy
• Caters to buyer persona
• Includes a compelling, relevant title
• Is timely
• Uses active voice
• Has flow
• Free of spelling and grammatical errors
• Contains credible, first-hand references
• Meta description follows best practices
• Eye-catching call to action
• Paragraphs are short and direct
• Skimmable
• Uses simple words

This piece was originally published October 16, 2019. It was significantly refreshed and repurposed as this blog post July 2023. Ben Sailer and Kate Schaefer contributed to this piece.

Marketing managers are flooded with marketing requests and no way to organize them. Your inbox is overflowing, there’s no good way to manage the process, and there is a constant fear that things are getting missed.

The good news is there are actually a few super slick processes for this in your CoSchedule Marketing Calendar.

Imagine never having to worry about missing requests that are stuck in your inbox!

In this blog post, you will find a step-by-step process to help you create a seamless system using CoSchedule’s Marketing Calendar with Zapier Integration & Google Forms.

[table of contents]

First, you’ll want to create a Google Form. Google Forms are easy to use & create – plus they’re free too!

To get started, here’s a Google Form template we’ve created for you.

Step 1: Create A Marketing Request Form

To get started, head to Google Forms. Browse the selection of templates, or click “Blank” to create your own from scratch:

Give your form a name, and add a description that tells your team:

• Who should use the form
• The purpose of the form
• The person who will be handling responses

Hit the “Add Question” button to insert the fields you’ll need for your request form:

Think through the information you need to know before you can start on a new project.

Make these items required fields on your Google Form.

This could include things like:

• Name & contact info for the requester
• Project details
• Project deadline
• And more!

Share The Link

Once you’ve created your form, it’s time to start sharing.

You can share a link to a Google Form with anybody by hitting “Send,” and limit permissions to only allow internal staff members (or departments) to access it:

Convert to Google Form

Now that you have your Google Form, you need a place to organize form submissions. You can do this with your Marketing Calendar by following these steps.

To do this, head over to your freshly-made Google Form and go to the “Responses” tab to turn this form into a Google Sheet.

Step 2: Create A New Marketing Requests Color Label

Now that you have created your request form, head over to your Marketing Calendar settings and create a new Color Label called “Marketing Requests.”

When people submit a marketing request form, it will appear in your Idea Bin. Keep in mind, the Idea Bin is different from the Idea Board (which is available in Marketing Suite plans).

Idea Bin creates a backlog of ideas that are not yet scheduled on the Calendar. This is where all of your Marketing Requests will go once submitted via your Google Form. You’ll learn how to do this in Step 3.

The next step is creating a Saved View called “Marketing Requests” using the color label you just made.

When you select the “Marketing Requests” saved view, your calendar and Idea Bin display only your marketing requests.

Step 3: Connect Zapier

When your Google Form is created, and you’ve added a new color label, connect Marketing Calendar to the Google Form using Zapier.

Click here to visit your Marketing Calendar account’s integration area to ensure you’ve added Zapier as an integration.

Don’t have a Zapier account? Click here to create a free Zapier account.

Once you’ve added the Zapier integration to your Marketing Calendar, you’ll need to create a Zap in Zapier.

In Zapier, choose to connect Google Forms with CoSchedule.

Once you’ve clicked “Use Zap,” Zapier will walk you through the process of setting it up. We’ll go through it below to help.

Sign into your Google account using the blue button.

Use the dropdown menu called “Spreadsheet” to find the sheet you created in step one.

Then choose Sheet 1 in the drop-down menu called “Worksheet.”

Next, you’ll continue to the CoSchedule part of the Zap setup. You might need to copy and paste the API key from your Marketing Calendar. You’ll find it in the integrations area on your Marketing Calendar.

Under the title field, find the option that says “projectname.”

In the description field, choose the option that says “description” from the drop-down menu.

Under the “Label” field, choose the “Marketing Requests” color label you just created.

Next, add yourself as the owner for all requests. This will notify you in your Marketing Calendar dashboard whenever a new request is created. Find your name using the drop-down menu to add yourself as the owner.

Finally, change the status to “Idea” and say “Yes” to send the request to your Idea Bin.

When finished, you’ll click “Continue” and finalize your Zap. A test will be sent to your calendar to ensure everything is connected correctly.

Step 4: Send The Google Form To Your Organization

Now that you’ve successfully set up your Zap. You’ll need to tell everyone at your organization that they need to use the Google Form to request marketing collateral from now on.

Here’s an example email you can steal to save time.

We also recommend bookmarking the link for quick access when people forget to use it. You can simply respond by sending them the link again until they get the hang of the new process.

Step 5: Monitor Incoming Requests

Once you’ve shared the request form with your organization, remember your Idea Bin because that’s where new requests will appear.

Switch to the saved view you created in Step 2 to visualize all the marketing requests your team is (or will be) working on.

When you decide to accept a request, drag and drop the request into the calendar.

Step 6: Share Project Progress With The Requester

Having that saved view allows you to share the calendar with anyone who does not have access. However, the Idea Bin is not included in the read-only link. Also, note that read-only views are only available in Marketing Calendar Pro, not the free version.

To create a read-only view, click “share calendar” and select your marketing request view.

This creates a read-only version of your calendar so stakeholders can stay in the know. This is convenient when you want to update the requester on the progress of their request.

You can also choose to download the saved view as a PDF rather than using a read-only link.

Follow these simple steps to triage incoming marketing requests using CoSchedule Marketing Calendar.

Getting marketing teams to adopt new software isn’t easy.

Even if your current toolset is substandard, sometimes people get comfortable with what they have. But, when fear of the unknown is allowed to prevent positive change, teams run massive risks, including:

1. Stagnation. The marketing industry moves fast, and getting left behind can be fatal for your organization.
2. Reduced efficiency. Sure, maybe your current processes aren’t technically broken. But, if they’re not organized and optimized, you’re trading greater success for status quo.
3. Wasted money. Adopting new software costs money, both for the product itself, and the time spent training new staff. So, if a marketing IT project fails, someone will be on the hook. This ties back into point number one above.

Using substandard tools puts businesses at risk for poor performance. But, changing means pushing people out of their comfort zone, which is definitely easier said than done. So, what’s the solution?

Implementing a smart user adoption strategy.

By showing your team a better future and strategically easing them into new processes, you can increase your odds for success dramatically. Best of all, it also makes onboarding your marketing department onto a new tool a lot easier.

[Tweet “How to Convince Your Marketing Team to Implement New Tools (Backed By Science)”]

What We Talk About When We Talk About User Adoption Strategy

“User adoption strategy” is a corporate-sounding term for “getting people to use a new piece of software, consistently.” As you know, it’s not as easy as it sounds.

70% of digital transformations that companies take on fall short of their objectives.

If you want to successfully onboard your team onto any new tool, having this kind of strategy will be essential.

Putting this together involves a few things:

• Understanding how change management works. As a marketer, your whole job is about getting people to do what you want (usually, giving your company money). That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve mastered the fine art of change management, which involves getting teams to adapt to (and ultimately champion) new processes.
• Training the team to use the new software. If people aren’t shown how to use the new tool, they’re more likely to avoid it as much as possible, until there’s no other way to get their work done without it. Then, they’ll use it, but they won’t be happy, and will probably swear at IT (or you).
• Improving existing processes. New tools should support better ways of doing things, which you’ll need to communicate to your team.

Let’s dig in.

We’ve Got Tons of Problems (And They All Involve Makeshift Marketing)

Makeshift marketing is one of the biggest reasons marketers look for new tools.

Essentially, this means using tools for marketing tasks, that weren’t designed for marketing teams. In practice, it often looks like:

• Doing too much in Excel: If you have spreadsheets to manage other spreadsheets, for work that shouldn’t be in a spreadsheet at all, you have a problem.
• Tools that are underpowered: Going cheap usually means paying twice later on.
• Software that doesn’t talk to each other: Disconnected tools make it tough to plan effective workflows. Switching between browser tabs is inherently inefficient.

So, these are some common problems new tools are often meant to fix. Or, maybe you’ve heard yourself drop one of these quotes:

• “I know there’s a better way to do this.” But, your existing tools make it harder to work smarter. That’s literally the opposite of everything that is good in this world.
• “Does anyone else see this problem that I do?” Something that seems obvious to you, might not seem obvious to others. But, they might come around if you can show how something could be improved.
• “How does [TOOL A] not have this new feature [TOOL B] just launched?” If you’re stuck with [TOOL A] for any reason, anyone using [TOOL B] probably fills you with jealous rage. Don’t get angry. Be like them.

These are all problems. And problems need solutions.

Adopting New Tools Means Confronting Change Head On

Switching to a new tool is an obvious necessity to you, but there will always be pushback from people that may not see the problem.

Humans are naturally resistant to change. When people are faced with change, they naturally emit responses of fear, fight, or flight.

Understanding the reasons people resist change will help you strategize around these fears.

Here are common reasons why your team may be resistant to adopting a new tool:

1. Deeply engaged with the current system.
2. Too busy to train and adopt new tools.
3. Feel comfortable with current tools.
4. Skeptical about the benefits of new tools.
5. Fear that it will create more work.<

Develop an adoption process to help your team understand what’s involved with the switch, how it compares to current tools, and how it will eliminate frustrations your current tools create.

Although the new tool may take time to implement, you need to convince them that there are more benefits than drawbacks.

An understanding of change management will help.

Make the case for TILA-compliant tools by using the TILA Compliance Generator to ensure your marketing materials meet the necessary standards.

Understanding Change Management: The Key to Making Good Things Happen

1) Show Your Business’s Need For Change

You know you need a new tool, but your team may not feel the same way. That’s why your team needs to know what problems this change solves.

• Show what is broken. Demonstrate a broken internal process by showing the inefficiencies of your current workflow. Some examples of this include inefficient workflows, ineffective approval process, difficulty finding project assets, and ineffective project collaboration.
• Illustrate improved performance using data. Show how long it takes to achieve a desired result without a tool, compared to with the tool.
• Share examples of success. If you can show your team how another company used a tool to get something done, it’ll be easier to envision themselves having similar success.

Whatever tool you are trying to adopt, hopefully they have a sales representative that can help you show the need for change. If they can sell it to you, they know what you can do to get buy-in from your team.

At CoSchedule, the Customer Success team assists you through this process to get your team onboarded quickly & excited to adopt Marketing Suite.

2 ) Show How Much Better Off You’ll Be After Changing

This is where you apply the research you gathered in step 1.

Take the performance data you collected, showing how much faster work gets done with the new tool. Or, if the task you’re working on is completely impossible without the tool, show the gap in your workflow that exists without the new software.

Then, sketch out your Before and After workflows in a document. Here’s a hypothetical example of what this might look like, using CoSchedule as the tool and creating a white paper as the task:

As you can tell, the workflow on the left is a lot more complicated and time-consuming. Workflow #2 solves both those problems and yields these benefits:

• Getting the project done more easily. Easier is better than tougher.
• Getting the project done faster. Less steps take less time. That means this marketer can do more things that drive results for the business.
• Getting the project done more effectively. When there are fewer steps, there are fewer opportunities for steps to get missed, or things to go awry.

Then, to support this claim, this marketer could use their time-tracking data to show exactly how much time gets saved:

To do this:

• Create a spreadsheet with columns for Task, Time Spent, Team Member (who’s doing the task, if it’s not yourself), and their Hourly Wage (so you can measure how much money is being saved by spending less time on a task).
• Use Toggl, a handy time tracking app, each time a task or project is executed.
• Run through this exercise several times (we’ll say five to 10 is probably a decent range) and calculate the average time spent with, and without, the tool.

When you have data that shows the new process and tool are better, you’ll have more than just opinion to lean on when building your case. It’s hard to argue with facts.

You can also reach out to the sales team that is selling the tool to see if they have any actionable data that can help convince your team.

If you’re lucky, the tools you are looking to adopt may already have ways to gather beneficial data. For example, CoSchedule offers an ROI Calculator to see exactly how much you will save in time, money, and effort.

3 ) Show the Team How You’ll Achieve Improvement

Now, it’s time to share how the team can drive the increase in performance with your new software.

Why? Because your team has tried adopting new tools in the past (with varied levels of success). There’s a reason 66% of change management projects are either late, over budget, or lack planned functionalities.

It’s important to outline everything on your way to success.

In short, this is where you look like a hero to your team, and a genius to your boss.

via GIPHY

To do this effectively, you’ll need to do the following:

• Get buy-in from your boss.
• Plan out the change roadmap.
• Present the tool to your team.

Let’s tackle each of these one at a time.

Getting Buy-In From Your Boss

By now, you have the data and research to build a case for your new tool.

The next step is to get decision-makers on board (if you don’t have that authority yourself).

When you get buy-in from your boss for the new tool, they can help you sell the importance of implementation to your team.

The strategy here will be similar to convincing your team to use the tool. Except, you will need to shift your narrative to how the new tool will benefit your boss.

Do this by speaking towards their needs and wants. Most likely, your boss wants your team to succeed and avoid loss. So, show them the reasons why failure to adopt this new tool will result in loss.

For example, sooner or later your boss will need to hire more people into marketing if this dysfunction continues which will result in more loss than adopting a new tool.

Furthermore, make it known that you will lead the charge for implementing this new tool and show the roadmap to get there.

Set Up An Hour-Long Meeting

Send a calendar invite to your boss with a clear meeting description and the reason you’d like to speak with them:

Go into the meeting with a plan. Outline an agenda like this:

• 10 minutes: Explain the existing problem.
• 10 minutes: Show the evidence that the problem is a big one.
• 10 minutes: Show the roadmap you’ll use to implement the change.
• 10 minutes: Show your proactive planning to address the forces of resistance.
• 10 minutes: Chat through how you’ll communicate the change with your team (and get their feedback), next steps, concerns, and when you will roll out the change.
• 10 minutes: Lay out your action items to work through after the meeting is over.

Create Your Timeline For Change

Before you present the new tool to your team, plot out when the change will happen. This should include:

• Dates when old tools will be shut down.
• Dates for when the new tool will be implemented.
• Dates for presenting the new tool and processes to your team.
• Dates for training sessions for your new tool and processes.

This doesn’t need to be complicated, necessarily. Just document these items for yourself. You’ll need these to complete the next step.

Build a Slide Deck to Present to Your Team

To make this easy, we’ve created a free marketing tool presentation template you can use with Google Slides. Click File > Make a Copy to create your own copy. Then, fill in each slide, and add any theme or design elements you’d like (we’ve intentionally left it unstyled):

Schedule Your Team Meeting

Next, create another meeting with everyone who will be impacted by the new tool. Check off the following things:

• Make a list of everyone who needs to be in the meeting.
• Pick a conference room big enough for everyone.
• Ensure you have a working projector.

If you haven’t given a presentation in a while (or ever), you might feel a little nervous. Maybe even intimidated. That’s okay! Go through a few practice rounds of your presentation. This quick video will also give you some basic pointers:

Prepare For Pushback

Now, if all goes well, you’ve won over your team and they’re thanking you for making their lives easier.

In the real world, though, odds are you’ll get some pushback. That isn’t necessarily because people want to be disagreeable. It’s just because they’re likely to have legitimate inquiries. If you’re going to ask people to change how they work, it’s fair for them to ask “why” and “how.”

Before giving your presentation, think on the following questions, and prepare some answers. This will help you avoid getting caught without a response:

1. Why this change?
2. Why now?
3. What do you expect from me now?
4. How will we collaborate now?
5. What aren’t we doing anymore?
6. What new things are we doing?
7. How should I voice my feedback?

Managing Internal Communication Around Your New Software

So, you’ve got buy-in, and your team is on board. Now, the challenge is to keep them on board.

via GIPHY

Depending on the complexity of the tool you’re implementing, there are some roadblocks you might run into. Those include:

• Team members not understanding how to use the software.
• IT failing to get things implemented in time.
• Software hiccups or issues.

Fortunately, these are all things you can get in front of.

Make Sure Implementation Goes Well With Strong Communication

To avoid communication breakdowns derailing getting your tool implemented, come up with a messaging plan. It should look something like this:

We’ve made a quick communication matrix template using Google Sheets that you can steal, too. Click File > Make a Copy to create an editable copy for your own purposes (the original needs to be kept intact). Edit each field to fit your own needs (the existing text is just instruction and placeholder).

The purpose of getting this documented is to ensure you know what each stakeholder needs to know (if anything) about the new tool, and more importantly, the process changes it’ll support.

Onboard Your Team

Now, it’s time to actually get your team using your new software.

Follow these steps to get your team rolling:

1. See if the new tool provider offers training or onboarding assistance.
2. Create accounts and temporary passwords for each team member. Store these somewhere safe so they don’t get lost.
3. Communicate to teams that formal training is on the way (if necessary).

Most software tools should have instructions to make this easy.

Here’s an example of a user onboarding guide from CoSchedule, and another more detailed guide to turn beginners into advanced users.

The sad truth is that 58% of employees say that their employer uses advanced digital tools but does not offer the training required to use them. Keep this in mind during your tool selection process. If your new solution does not offer training or resources, you’ll need to develop a plan on your own.

Finally, if you’re purchasing an advanced tool with powerful capabilities, check if they offer robust ongoing training and support. This can help take an enormous weight off your shoulders when it comes to training (and ensuring your team can be successful with the new software).

At CoSchedule, we provide a Getting Started Guide, custom onboarding, personalized training, & implementation strategies led by a Customer Success Manager on our customer success team.

This manager will also do ongoing training for: new team members, new features, quarterly check-ins, & more.

Your Team + The Right Tools = Success

If you follow this process, you should have no trouble getting your team set up with your new software. Let’s recap what we’ve covered:

• First, we covered what makes change difficult, especially for teams.
• Then, we covered how to build the case for new software.
• Finally, we showed you how to get your team on board, and ensure a successful future.

At this point, you’re ready to be a hero, saving your company from poor processes, broken workflows, and underpowered tools. Now, go be a champion for your team’s success!

Ready to try CoSchedule? Create your free marketing calendar or schedule a demo with our team.

As a marketing manager, you work hard to smooth out the edges in your organization’s processes. Part of that work is having an efficient way for people to submit marketing requests.

Right now, your inbox is overflowing, there’s no good way to manage the process, and there is a constant fear that things are getting missed.

Luckily, CoSchedule Marketing Suite has tools & processes to help you triage incoming requests like a pro.

Don’t have Marketing Suite? Find out how to use request forms in Marketing Calendar.

[table of contents]

When you use Request Forms in Marketing Suite, you can:

1. Formalize your project intake request process by creating custom request forms.
2. Build forms for specific teams, projects, & purposes to collect necessary project details upfront.
3. Easily prioritize incoming requests using Request Forms + Idea Board.
4. Stay notified when new requests come in.
5. Track the progress of new marketing campaigns & projects.
6. Put requests into action with one click.

Imagine never having to worry about missing requests that are stuck in your inbox! Simply follow the step-by-step process in this blog post to make it happen.

This post will show you exactly how to triage requests using Request Forms + Idea Board in Marketing Suite.

Ready to implement your own marketing request form?

Regardless of what you’re using the form for, it’s relatively quick and easy to set up a marketing request form for your internal team to use.

There are four steps you can follow to build your request form system successfully.

1. Create Your Marketing Request Form
2. Set Up A New Requests Idea Board
3. Share The Link To Start Receiving Requests
4. Prioritize And Organize Requests

Step 1: Create Your Request Form With Marketing Suite

Create a Request Form

The first step in creating a request form is locating the Request Form tab in your Calendar Settings. Here, you can see all your request forms and edit or remove them.

To create a new request form, click on “Create Request Form.”

From here, you can fill out all necessary information, such as title, project template, project type, initial status, label, and assign the owner of the form.

Customize Your Request Form

Once you press create, you can customize your request form. This is where you can narrow down or broaden your request form to make sure requesters fill out all the necessary information you need for new projects.

Choose which fields you want to include and the project your form creates. Make sure to check the box “Require Field” if you want that information filled out on every form.

When customizing your form, you can add any of the custom fields that have been previously created. Learn how to create a custom field here.

Step 2: Set Up A New Requests Idea Board

Now that you’ve created your request form, it’s time to create a custom workflow within your Idea Board. This is where all requests will be organized based on status.

The best way to do this is to set up a Saved View in your Idea Board where the status of each request is listed. Include the statuses you want and arrange them in a way that makes sense for your workflow. Learn how to create a status.

The picture below gives an example of what your custom workflow for Request Forms could look like in the Idea Board.

Now Request Forms that your team submits will appear under the status, “New Requests.” From there, you can prioritize them & move them to their “next step” status to move work forward.

Having a complete understanding of where you’re at with each request will allow you to prioritize which ones need to be worked on next.

Learn more about managing the Idea Board by checking out our support doc.

Step 3: Share The Link With Your Organization To Submit Requests

Before receiving requests, you must share the Request Form link with any individuals or teams requesting marketing projects.

We recommend sending out an email. In the message, be straightforward in your communication and tell them why this change is being made to the project request process, how to use the request form, and the appropriate times to use it.

We recommend bookmarking the link yourself for quick access when people inevitably forget to use it. You can simply respond by sending them the link again until they get the hang of the new process.

Share A Read-Only Link To Track Request Progress

Have any requesters that constantly ask, “When will my project be done?”

With Marketing Suite, you can create a read-only view of your Idea Board to keep these people informed about what stage their request is at in the creative process.

To create a read-only view, click “Share Calendar” and select your marketing request view.

This is how a read-only link looks to stakeholders.

You can choose to download the saved view as a PDF rather than using a read-only link.

If you receive many requests across the company, you can create Saved Views for each specific team to give them a clear view of what marketing is working on for their department.

Step 4: Prioritize Incoming Project Requests

Congrats! You have a beautifully crafted system where team members can submit form requests. To get the most out of your new system, make sure you are checking the requests and taking action in a timely manner.

Monitor and Organize Incoming Requests

Form submissions will begin trickling in, which means your team is submitting requests that need your attention.

As these requests come in, you will get notifications through your email and your CoSchedule App.

When a request is submitted, you can find it in the “New Requests” column you created in Step 2. From there, you can prioritize and organize them directly through the Idea Board.

After seeing the incoming request, you’ll need to decide how this project will fit into your team’s schedule.

If it is something you won’t prioritize immediately, move it to the Backlog Status.

This serves as a visual reminder that you know the request has been submitted but aren’t ready to prioritize it.

Once you’ve decided to approve the request & start work, move it into production by changing the status & assigning tasks to your team.

Analyze Requests and Take Action

Spend some time looking at your team’s requests and decide your next plan of action.

That might include:

• Scheduling a meeting with the person who submitted the idea to discuss it in detail
• Approving their request and giving them the go-ahead for a new project
• Passing the request to someone better placed to handle it

For more information on using marketing request forms in Marketing Suite, visit our support doc.

Learn more about marketing request forms in general by visiting: Marketing Request Forms: How to Create One Your Team Will Actually Use

This blog post was originally published in October of 2019. It was updated and republished in January of 2020 and again in May 2023.

But now comes the hard part: helping your team successfully adopt your new software.

This blog post is packed with actionable tips to help your team adopt this new software in no time.

By the end of this post, you will be equipped with a plan to help you sell your team on using CoSchedule Marketing Suite for the long run.

[table of contents]

To convince your team that this tool is the answer, you will need to become an expert in everything CoSchedule Marketing Suite offers.

Humans are naturally adverse to change, so you will most likely encounter resistance when presenting this tool.

This is where your expertise in Marketing Suite will come in handy. Your team will respond with questions, and you’ll know how to answer them.

Highlight 1: Consolidation (AKA Your One-Stop Marketing Shop)

One of the first questions you’ll get is, “Why are we switching to CoSchedule Marketing Suite?”

There’s a tool problem with marketers, and it’s called makeshift marketing. Organizations are getting stuck using multiple different tools that don’t work well together.

Highlight the frustrations and challenges with your current tool stack. Why is this approach so painful?

• You’re constantly switching between multiple tools.
• You’re unable to find all documents and information for specific projects.
• You have disconnected tools that make it tough to plan and strategize in one place.
• Team members are confused about where assets are and the status of projects.
• You’re following up for progress updates, questions about projects, & more via email or Slack.
• You can’t find the latest versions of work in progress.
• You spend more time planning your marketing than actually executing it.
• And so much more.

CoSchedule Marketing Suite is the tool that will ease all of this pain. Show your team how it will help them do more marketing in less time. With a user-friendly calendar, your team can visualize your entire marketing strategy in real time.

There will be no more disconnected workflows. No more digging through an endless amount of open tabs. Your team’s projects, assets, communication, deadlines, tasks, & details are in one place.

In addition, your team can still use your go-to tools with integrations like WordPress, Google Analytics, MailChimp, Google Drive, Microsoft Office, social media platforms, and much more.

You can also quickly export your existing project data from another tool with a bulk-import to make the transition a breeze.

Highlight 2: Plan Your Work To Improve Productivity

Like many other marketing teams, you’ve probably tried planning your work using spreadsheets or a multitude of other project management software. This often leads to missed deadlines, outdated documents, broken workflows, roadblocks, wasted time, and lower-quality work.

You and your team have tried to be proactive planners, but the tools in your arsenal limit your capabilities.

When you plan ahead with CoSchedule Marketing Suite, you can ensure your entire team has enough work, enough time, and enough flexibility to successfully execute project requests alongside campaigns.

Marketing Suite’s robust task management tools will help you manage your team and their projects. These capabilities will help you develop a high-performance team that completes projects on time by balancing the predictability and flexibility of their work.

Now, let’s look at the features that will help you achieve all these things.

Manage Team Resources With Ease

The Team Management Dashboard allows you to easily delegate, assign, & reassign work to manage your team’s priorities effectively.

This view gives managers visibility into what you and your team are doing this week (and beyond). At a glance, you can check in to see how employees are handling their workloads. This helps you prevent overloading your team when things are busy while keeping them productive when work is light.

Work Management

One of the best ways Marketing Suite is great for your team is that it sets up every employee for success. They will consistently be focused on the right work at the right time.

Each team member can easily see to-do lists and upcoming tasks with the Home Dashboard. This gives your team clear timelines & due dates so that they meet deadlines every time.

This home view makes it easy to understand their priorities and get real-time updates on communication-related to their work-in-progress via notifications.

Automate Complex Processes

Say goodbye to roadblocks in your marketing process. With Marketing Suite, your entire team can spend less time on project handoffs and following up for project approvals.

Apply Task Rules to build out intelligent triggers that seamlessly move your projects through each stage of your team’s workflow. Add required approvals for compliance and legal review to ensure every project meets industry and company standards before publishing.

Apply Repeatable Workflows In Seconds

If your employees need to get a new project moving forward, you can automatically assign tasks in seconds.

Instead of manually adding and updating tasks for recurring projects like blog posts, social campaigns, email newsletters, or monthly performance reports. Use Task Templates to map out reusable workflows to intelligently assign tasks with relative due dates to ensure projects get completed on time.

Stay Flexible When Plans Change

Your entire marketing team knows that priorities can change in a second.

Highlight how easy it is to pivot using Marketing Suite. Marketing Suite makes rescheduling flexible with automated workflows and rescheduling features.

Simply drag and drop projects to their new publish date, and all the connected tasks and projects will reschedule along with it.

Highlight 3: Easily Communicate With Your Team & Stakeholders

Communication is obviously important, but what if you could eliminate unnecessary communication that slows down productivity?

Communication is only a good thing when it’s effective. Right now, your team is probably commonly confused about their tasks and projects. So what do they do? They drop by your desk to ask questions, send emails that won’t get replied to, or waste time trying to figure it out themselves.

Questions are great for clearing up confusion. But what if we eliminated that confusion in the first place?

Demonstrate how your team can eliminate this confusion by providing team members with all the information and resources needed to succeed.

Working on projects together is increasingly easy with the discussion tab and functionality within projects.

Discussions are available in projects and are a great way to collaborate. You can also share files directly in a discussion, like images, new text changes, or any document that pertains to the project.

This way, anyone working on the project can jump in and have everything they need to do their work.

Have team members that work with stakeholders, vendors, agency partners, or leadership?

Marketing Suite allows you to share a read-only version of your calendar, a filtered calendar view, or an individual project.

Read-Only Views are valuable if you need to:

• Share project updates.
• Prove the value of the marketing department.
• Provide updates to stakeholders.
• Share the status of projects with clients.

The custom-filtered views of your calendar are interactive, update in real-time, and give stakeholders the details they want.

Instead of spending time replying to emails or following up with updates, you can provide stakeholders with a read-only link, so they can check in on progress any time they want.

Highlight 4: Easily Find And Share Projects Or Files

When we say, “Bring together all your projects, processes, & team into one place,” we mean it.

Right now, essential aspects of your projects are scattered throughout multiple tools. Your team works on so many projects that half the time, they don’t even remember where certain things are.

Even worse, only certain people know where these project assets are, so it’s impossible to find them if you haven’t worked on them since day one.

Let’s not forget your team’s frustration when a file is saved locally instead of on a shared team drive.

In Marketing Suite, your Projects combine all your processes and assets into one area so there’s no confusion. There is no need to dig through old messages or email threads to find “that one thing” that will help you complete your project.

Utilize project attachments to stay organized, find the correct files fast, and keep your projects on track. That way, people working on a project will have all the resources they need in one place.

Even better, all of your assets and final deliverables can be stored in the Asset Organizer.

The Asset Organizer is a digital asset management software where your team can store, index, and share your content.

The Asset Organizer will ensure your team never loses track of assets. Instead of assets being scattered across multiple tools, they are easily accessible in one place.

Quickly Find The Files You Need To Get Work Done

Use labels and tags to organize assets by topic, team, or audience. Your team will find the files they need in just a few clicks instead of scouring their entire computer. Your team creates incredible marketing assets; shouldn’t you be able to find them?

Maintain Control Over Brand Assets

Easily update existing resources and keep track of previous versions so they aren’t lost forever. A content audit will help ensure that all your files, content, and design are up to date.

Share Project Deliverables With Stakeholders

Give stakeholders and internal teams secure, direct access to the content you create for them. Securely share folders and specific files using custom sharing links. Your team can easily replace outdated files as you make updates, so everyone has the most recent versions.

Highlight 5: Get To Know The [Amazing] Social Tools

You are in control of your company’s brand story, and a big part of that depends on your social media strategy. You know that inconsistency with your social media is not good for your brand.

However, you have multiple social media platforms, and keeping up is becoming increasingly difficult.

These next tools are for your team members that work on social media strategy.

Trying to manage your social media presence can sometimes feel like repetitive busywork. Switching in and out of social profiles to manually post singular messages is a tedious and unnecessary task.

Even more, tracking your social media publishing in a spreadsheet isn’t sufficient anymore.

It’s time to accelerate your social media strategy by simplifying these painstaking processes.

Marketing Suite centralizes your social strategy, so you can create more messages, publish them at the right time, and prove the value of social media to stakeholders.

Write, schedule, and publish all your social messages in the same place. Having it on a unified calendar makes it easy to visualize your entire social media strategy and align it with company goals.

Social Campaign

A Social Campaign allows you to create, organize, and track multiple messages. You no longer need to go in and out of different social profiles. Instead, you can write, schedule, and post to your social profiles with just a few clicks.

Stay in control of your social media strategy by seeing exactly where posts are going and when.

When creating social messages, you have direct access to a built-in social message optimizer that helps you write more engaging social messages.

Social Templates

With Social Templates, your team can create the perfect social sharing plan, fine-tune your messages, and apply a reusable template to any content or social media campaign.

ReQueue

Wouldn’t it be nice to drive more traffic, boost engagement, and have an awesome social media presence while doing no work at all? ReQueue does all the work for you so you can spend time on other, non-tedious tasks.

ReQueue is a social media automation tool that automatically reshares your best social messages for you, so you can get more results from social media with less effort.

Your social media strategist can find your best evergreen content and add it to ReQueue to get more leverage out of the social messages your audience already loves weeks, months, and even years down the road – with zero manual effort to fill your social media calendar.

Highlight 6: Prove The Value Of Your Work

You know measuring success is essential to any campaign or project. However, presenting this information effectively to stakeholders and higher-ups can be difficult. Tracking projects, campaigns, & status updates can take forever to put together manually.

If you have team members that spend time putting together presentations or reports for stakeholders, these reports are for you!

Marketing Suite compiles these reports for you, so you don’t need to spend hours collecting, analyzing, and organizing data.

Project Reports & Campaign Reports can help your marketing team:

• Demonstrate how campaigns and projects align with business goals.
• Prove team productivity.
• Plan ahead and stay on top of upcoming projects and campaigns.
• Showcase successful projects and campaigns.

Best of all, you can export these reports and send them directly to anyone requesting them.

Hooray! You are now equipped with some bullet-proof talking points on why CoSchedule Marketing Suite is the perfect solution for your team.

Your team cares about one thing: how will this make my life easier? You COULD spit out facts about how much more organized and effective the team will be… but let’s save that for when you try to convince your boss. The individuals within your team care about those things too, but they ultimately want to know if this change will make their lives easier or harder.

Therefore, your presentation will revolve around how CoSchedule Marketing Suite will benefit the team collectively and individually.

Highlight The Benefits

You’ve already learned about all the benefits; now, let’s align those benefits with the problems your team hates.

Your team will love Marketing Suite if it makes their lives easier and solves their problems. So ask yourself, how will this solve a problem for them? Think about all the times you’ve heard disgruntled co-workers complaining about certain things.

Here are some examples:

• “I don’t even know why we’re doing this.”
• “I can’t find the [asset] anywhere, and it’s taking forever.”
• “It’s so frustrating that [tool] isn’t compatible with [another tool].”
• “I spend half my day switching tabs trying to find something.”
• “Our social media has no clear direction.”
• “We forgot to update that project and get it published, so now we have to work longer.”
• “I’m so confused with this project.”
• “I still haven’t gotten a reply for the request I submitted weeks ago.”

Identify your team’s problems and align the solutions you’ve learned from this post.

Share With The Rest Of Your Team

Once you feel completely prepped, create a meeting with everyone who will be impacted by the new tool.

If you’re actively in the Sales Process, your Sales Exec will provide you with a pitch deck to get your team on board. Share this during the meeting, and be ready to answer any questions they may have about CoSchedule Marketing Suite.

Remember, people are naturally adverse to change, so you will get pushback at some point. Here are common reasons why your team may resist adopting Marketing Suite:

1. Deeply engaged with the current system.
2. Too busy to train and adopt new tools.
3. Feel comfortable with current tools.
4. Skeptical about the benefits of new tools.
5. Fear that it will create more work.

These are the underlying reasons which will lead to team members objecting to change.

Make sure to predict objections and prepare for how you will refute them.

Now, it’s time to implement the tool you’ve worked so hard for.

CoSchedule works hard to make the onboarding process as simple and painless as possible; so that your team can start finding value immediately.

The Customer Success Team at CoSchedule will take you through our proven onboarding process. During onboarding, your CSM will help you set up your Calendar and train your entire team on your new CoSchedule Marketing Suite quickly and effectively.

Your team will get a Customer Success Manager available for ongoing training and support whenever you need it.

Your CSM will provide:

• Custom transition plans to retire tools replaced by CoSchedule Marketing Suite
• Calendar Setup & Strategy
• Custom Stakeholder Communication Plans
• Team Onboarding & Training
• New Employee Training As Needed
• Continued Support

In addition, everyone on your team will have access to on-demand training courses and guides. Teams that sign up for Marketing Suite successfully onboard their entire team in 60 days or less.

Plus, if you already have projects and content in a different platform, you can bulk import this content to your Marketing Calendar. This speeds up timelines as you transition to Marketing Suite.

Haven’t scheduled a demo of Marketing Suite yet? Schedule a free demo with a CoSchedule expert.

There are many tools you can choose to power your marketing efforts. As marketers, we have more options than ever to build a marketing technology stack that’s aligned with our goals and needs.

That sounds like a good thing, but there’s a problem…

There are endless possibilities when it comes to Martech stacks.

There are so many of them it’s hard to know where to even start. What’s worth your effort and budget? What will genuinely allow you to create the results you want?

Luckily, there’s a way to build your martech stack and narrow more than 10,000 software options down to just a handful: being strategic about your marketing toolkit. This guide will show you how.

[table of contents]

[content_upgrade_shortcode]

What Is Marketing Technology (Martech)?

This software lets them build and promote content, interact with the company’s audience, generate press mentions, schedule posts across platforms, and analyze performance—all in the service of business goals like demand generation, lead generation, conversion, and customer retention.

What Is A Martech Stack?

Your martech stack will cover a range of:

• Channels: blog, email marketing, social media, etc.
• Content formats: text, video, images, etc.
• Process steps: brainstorming, outlining, writing, recording, editing, publishing, updating, etc.
• Goals: audience growth, lead generation, sales, retention, analytics, etc.

The ideal marketing tech stack is the one in which you’ve picked your tools strategically and ensured they work well together—whether through native integrations or third-party tools like Zapier or VistaCreate.

That way, you can work inside each tool intentionally to complete your marketing tasks for the day quickly, efficiently, and with maximum results.

The Types Of Martech Tools To Consider In Your Stack

Each company’s martech stack is like a fingerprint—no two marketing stacks are alike, just like no two marketing teams function the same way.

When considering different marketing platforms and tools for your team’s tech stack, remember that there will be some overlap between tools in different categories and that some tools may cover multiple categories. That’s okay. What matters is what a tool can do best for your marketing team’s needs at different stages of your processes, from core activities to small, repetitive tasks.

In other words, consider these categories a starting point, not a must-have. Let’s go over each of them:

1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools

A CRM tool will keep all of your prospect and customer data integrated and easy to access.

This way, you can track your lead generation, the activities that help turn a lead into a customer, and the steps to onboard new customers. Do this successfully, and you’ll turn them into your loyal users and brand ambassadors.

Examples of CRM tools: Salesforce, Pipedrive, HubSpot

2. Customer Support Tools

Customer support tools make it easy to monitor, assign, and solve any issues that come up for your customers. These tools can offer solutions like live chat, a knowledge base, email, phone, and more.

Examples of customer support tools: Intercom, Zendesk, Help Scout

3. Email Marketing Tools

With email marketing tools, you can send newsletters to your whole list or segment your list to send specific emails to customers based on what they purchased, the emails they previously opened and interacted with, their status in your loyalty program, and more.

Examples of email marketing tools: Mailchimp, Constant Contact, AWeber

4. Social Media Marketing Tools

You can use a social media marketing platform to create, schedule, and analyze your social media posts across different platforms, like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and Pinterest.

Examples of social media marketing tools: Hootsuite, Buffer, Sprout Social

5. Marketing Project Management Tools

Marketing-focused project management software lets you plan and execute every step of your marketing campaigns from one central platform.

That means whether you’re planning a piece of content or a bigger launch, you can instantly integrate all moving pieces—like the creative stages and the social media promotion— from the start. This lets you stay organized, flexible, and on track.

Examples of marketing project management tools: CoSchedule’s Marketing Calendar and Marketing Suite

6. Social Listening & Brand Monitoring Tools

Social listening and monitoring tools let you grasp how people perceive your brand, products, competitors, and the industry as a whole. The insights you get from social listening and brand monitoring can be a foundation for customer loyalty efforts, creative marketing campaigns, and press activities.

Examples of social listening and brand monitoring tools: Brandwatch, BuzzSumo, TweetDeck

7. Landing Page Tools

With landing page tools, you can build a landing page or an embeddable opt-in form for any kind of marketing campaigns, like experiments with new types of lead magnets, email list building, product launches, and more.

Examples of landing page tools: Unbounce, Leadpages

8. Content Management System (CMS) Tools

Your CMS is where you upload, publish, and manage all of your website content. This includes blog posts, product pages, pricing, FAQ pages, case studies, and essential sections like ‘about us’ and contact forms.

Having clearly outlined ownership over various parts of a software solution is essential for all tools in your marketing tech stack, but this is even more emphasized in your CMS. That’s because any changes you make to specific sections, pages, or blog posts should be reflected elsewhere for a consistent customer journey and experience.

Examples of CMS tools: WordPress, Webflow

9. Analytics Tools

How is your marketing doing against your goals? That’s the question analytics tools answer.

This includes the size of your audience, the channels they use to find you and interact with your content, how long they stick around, how often they return, how many of them convert into subscribers or customers, and more.

Examples of analytics tools: Google Analytics, Hotjar, Mixpanel

10. SEO Tools

If search engine rankings are your priority, you’ll need SEO tools to research keywords, understand search intent, come up with and narrow down topic ideas, and track how your position in search results changes as you invest in your SEO.

Examples of SEO tools: Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz

11. Online Advertising Tools

Want to invest in paid ads on social media and/or search engines? For this, you’ll rely on martech tools that allow you to place your ads, track their performance, and even use machine learning to optimize your ad results.

This way, your ads will reach the right people at the right time, and you’ll make the most of your ad budget.

Examples of online ad tools: AdRoll, Criteo

12. Video Tools

If video is part of your marketing strategy, whether short-form video on social media or long-form video on your website or YouTube, video tools will help you record and edit your content.

Thanks to these tools, you can record your screen or make a voiceover, as well as import other clips and edit them into a final product that shares your message.

Examples of video tools: Screenflow, VEED, Biteable

13. Automation Tools

There are lots of things in marketing that can create next-level results but don’t need to be done manually.

Sending post-purchase emails, following up a few days after a customer support issue was solved, SMS campaigns that recommend products based on past purchases—you can do this, and so much more, thanks to automation tools.

Examples of automation tools: HubSpot, Klaviyo

14. Content Curation Tools

One of the biggest content challenges is always generating fresh, original ideas and creating content from it. Content curation lets you share third-party ideas your audience loves, finds relevant, and trusts you for—without adding more work to your plate.

Examples of content curation tools: Feedly, Scoop.it

15. Content Optimization Tools:

Want your long-form content to do well in search? Content optimization tools help you make it as relevant and comprehensive as possible and analyze search intent, your competitors, crucial terms to cover in your content, and more.

Examples of content optimization tools: CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer and Headline Studio, Frase, Clearscope

16. Digital Asset Management Tools:

As you build different marketing campaigns, do you know exactly where to find each digital asset you need—an image, logo, video, and the latest version of a draft? What about others on your team?

A digital asset management tool is a crucial part of marketing management. It will help you store, index, and share each file you need so everyone can do their best work and save time looking for the assets they need.

Examples of digital asset management tools: CoSchedule’s Asset Organizer, Google Drive, Dropbox

Get Inspired: CoSchedule’s Marketing Tech Stack Diagram

Your martech stack diagram can look any way you want.

For example, you can focus on the stages of the marketing funnel—awareness, consideration, purchase, and retention—and split your tools that way.

Or you can divide your tools into stages of your process, like planning/brainstorming, execution, and analysis.

CoSchedule’s marketing stack diagram has parts of both approaches, representing how our workflow and marketing funnel work together:

Check Out 5 Marketing Tech Stack Examples (With Diagrams)

If you want more ideas and inspiration for how to structure and visualize your tech stack, check out these martech stack diagrams from companies of different sizes and industries.

Brighttail, a B2B marketing agency, divided its martech stack into planning, execution, distribution, reporting, optimization, and alignment:

Brighttail uses the term “launching into martech” to demonstrate their stack.

UnitedHealthcare, an insurance company, split its marketing tech stack into marketing automation and engagement, analytics and reporting, digital publishing, asset management, and productivity tools:

View the United Healthcare stack and many other examples.

For Philips, the health tech giant, everything starts from the customer and branches out into website, mobile app, social, event, sales, and customer care:

Philips Marketing & e-Commerce eco-system use the term “building blocks” to demonstrate their martech stack.

Filestage, a review and approval platform, divided its marketing tech stack into the collaborate, create, grow, nurture, and future categories:

Like many others, Filestage divided their stack into five categories.

Finally, for Rabobank, a financial services company, the martech stack is split into collect, unify, enrich, activate, create, and predict categories:

View Rabobank’s stack and many others here.

How To Build Your Martech Stack

Building the right marketing tech stack requires some effort up front, but getting it right means you’ll reap the rewards for a long time to come.

It also means you won’t have to redo this process over and over, which would take precious budget, time, and energy away from marketing projects and the results they could create.

Remember: you can use our marketing stack template to track your research, share it with your team, and use it to make the most informed decision.

Here are the steps you can follow:

Step 1: Take Note Of Your Marketing Goals & Channels

You could argue that every company’s marketing goal is to be known in their industry and to win customers. After all, that’s the essence of marketing.

But in order to execute the right campaigns (and source the right tools for them), we need to get more specific. Here are two examples of SMART marketing goals:

• Higher search engine rankings: “By the end of the year, we will increase our search results page position from 12th to the top 3 for our main brand-related keywords to drive more organic traffic. This also leads to our pages through keyword and content optimization.”
• Lead generation: “We will bring in 100 new leads by the end of the year by carrying out targeted campaigns on social media involving a mix of paid and organic posts.”

In this first step, outline marketing goals you’re focusing on in the next few quarters, along with the channels you’ll use to hit those goals.

If you’re curious about new channels and experiments you could run, but it doesn’t fit into your goals for the year, take note of them—but don’t let them become a shiny object that distracts you from the goals that will drive your company forward.

Step 2: Get Input From Marketing Team Members

No matter how big or small your marketing team is, create a safe space for them to voice their needs for tools, platforms, templates, and resources they need to do their best work. Include managers, writers, editors, strategists, SEOs—everyone.

Ask them to privately brain-dump their thoughts and needs into a document, a structured survey, during a meeting, or some combination. Here are some questions you can use as prompts:

• What tools have helped you do your job the most?
• What tools or features are you currently missing?
• What tool or resource would make your workflow smoother or less challenging?
• Is there anything that takes longer than it could?
• What part of your workflow could you better automate or integrate with other tools?

You might get suggestions for tool features and functions they crave or specific tools on the market. Consider all suggestions valid, and take note of them all.

Step 3: Define Your Budget Range

Some tools are free or cost $15 per month, while others come up to four-figure price tags per year. Neither are inherently good or bad options—what matters is how they fit into what you need and what you can afford.

Before you start researching different tools and options, it’s hard to know the exact budget you’ll need for them. Still, try to come up with a realistic budget range for your marketing tools every year—this will make your research more guided.

Step 4: Dive Into Research For Potential Tools In Your Marketing Stack

Start by listing potential tools from what your team members mentioned in their responses and similar/competitive tools to those.

To get more tool ideas, tap into websites like G2 and Capterra, as they let you navigate different tool categories. You can also check out YouTube videos, tweets, and LinkedIn posts that mention personal experiences and tool recommendations.

Then, dive into:

• Reviews on above mentioned (and other) review sites from companies similar to yours in size, industry, etc.
• Case studies and success stories to understand if your challenges and pain points match those that successful customers experienced before using the tool
• Pricing options, including different plans, billing cycles, and cost per seat
• How long it takes to get started and to fully use the tool

The priority here is to make sure a tool fits your needs before you even get to the pricing details. Pricing is what helps match specific tools to your budget.

Step 5: Select Your Tools & Run Them By Your Team

It’s time to select your tools. You now have a couple of options per tool category (ideally not many more than that) along with their costs.

Run through each category and choose one tool based on the ratio of its benefits and price—if a tool is slightly more expensive than others, but brings dramatically more benefits based on your needs, it’s probably your best bet.

Once you have a list of your preferred tools, get your team together again and gather their feedback. You’ve already used their inputs for your research and selection, so this should ensure everyone’s in the same place—and happy—about the stack you picked.

Step 6: Make Your Purchases, Get Onboarded, & Review Regularly

Finally, sign up for your chosen tools. If the company offers onboarding, take advantage of it along with any teammates that will be using it so you can make the most of the features the tool provides.

Schedule a recurring reminder—for example, every six to 12 weeks—to review how your stack is serving you in your pursuit of ambitious marketing goals. Success lies in this regular effort to make the most out of the tools in your toolbox, so you can sharpen, tweak, or replace them if necessary.

Build Your Martech Stack Into Your Workflow

The tools you pick are the gear that helps you execute powerful activities that bring results. The activities in question, of course, are down to what’s in your marketing strategy—and your marketing calendar.

So make sure they’re the right ones.

Martech Stack FAQs

What Is An Example Of Marketing Technology?

Marketing technology includes tools and platforms that help marketers deliver their best work and hit marketing and business goals.

This can be a CRM platform, a marketing calendar tool, a social media scheduler, and a blog post optimization tool.

What Are Marketing Tech Tools?

Marketing tech tools help marketers execute every stage of a marketing campaign— from planning and outlining campaigns to building content, launching campaigns, analyzing marketing data, and automating/streamlining a marketing process.

How Do You Build A Marketing Tech Stack?

Building a marketing tech stack includes these six steps:

1. Take note of your marketing goals and channels
2. Get input from all marketing team members
3. Define your martech stack budget range
4. Research potential tools for your stack
5. Select your tools and run the list by your team
6. Purchase marketing tools, go through onboarding, and review regularly

Why Does My Organization Need A Marketing Stack?

Modern marketing is nearly impossible to do well without tools.

By choosing the best technologies for each task and area of need, marketing departments can give themselves an edge over the competition while working more effectively and efficiently.

What Does A Marketing Stack Look Like?

The specific tools that make up a marketing technology stack may vary from one organization to another.

Each tool in your stack needs to fulfill a particular obligation, like enabling your social media strategists to post content more often.

A typical marketing tool stack will look something like this.

Are you tired of feeling like your business is treading water? Does it seem like no matter what you try, your customer base won’t grow? If so, let’s talk about your business’s lifeblood: customer acquisition.

Businesses need a steady stream of new customers to keep their doors open, invest in talent, fund their growth, and turn a profit. But generating traffic and leads is a challenge that all businesses face. That’s why creating an effective customer acquisition strategy is essential for success.

Let’s dive into how to develop your own customer acquisition strategy from scratch. You will learn how to identify, engage, and convert your target audience into paying customers through targeted, cost-effective tactics. So if you are ready to breathe new life into your business, let’s begin!

[table of contents]

What Is Customer Acquisition?

This effort often requires the collaboration of marketing, sales, and customer service teams to create a seamless customer journey.

The effectiveness of a customer acquisition strategy can be boiled down to a handful of metrics, namely, Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). This figure represents the average cost of earning a new customer, including advertising spend, content production, sales commissions, and any other related expenses.

By understanding this number and how it relates to Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), businesses can evaluate the success of their customer acquisition strategies and adjust them accordingly.

Most companies strive to maintain a consistent ratio between these two metrics, such as 4:1 or 5:1, meaning CLV is 4 to 5 times greater than CAC. While the exact proportion varies based on industry and business model, the relationship between these figures informs and guides much of the customer acquisition process.

How To Develop Your Customer Acquisition Strategy

Now that we understand customer acquisition and how we measure it, let’s look into developing an effective customer acquisition strategy. Here is a simple 7-step framework to build your own:

1.) Identify Your Ideal Customer

If your company already has customers, start by analyzing their demographic and psychographic characteristics. Look at their age, gender, location, interests, values, job titles, and more. This data will be available on Google Analytics, social media accounts, and other marketing channels.

Once you have the basics down, consider what makes your customers unique and why they may have chosen your business over competitors. Or, if you have the resources to do so, conduct customer surveys and interviews. Ask about their needs, preferences, and perceptions of your products or services.

Recommended: Customer Survey Question Generator

And if you do not have any existing customers, begin with market research. Try to understand the market, customer behavior, and recent trends. Read industry reports, join forums, talk to experts, and get in front of as many actual buyers as possible.

Use this knowledge to create a profile of your ideal customer persona. The profile should help answer questions like:

• Who do we serve?
• Where do they spend time?
• What are their goals?
• What pain points do they have?
• What role do we play in their lives?

This overview will inform your customer acquisition strategy and how you design and market your products or services. Of course, you should continue to refine this profile over time to reflect new customer feedback and insights.

2.) Define Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Every business should have a clear USP — a distinguishing characteristic, feature, or benefit that sets it apart from competitors. To determine yours, follow these three steps:

• Analyze your competition: Look at what other businesses in your niche offer and how they market their products or services. Search their reviews, social media comments, and platforms like Reddit to find candid customer feedback.
• Identify your strength(s): Ask yourself why your product or service is better than others. This could be your expertise, special production processes, quality standards, or top-notch customer service. Whatever you choose, make sure that your competitors cannot match your specific strength. Potential customers should be able to readily identify that you offer a unique feature, a lower price, faster delivery, or something else of value.
• Distill your message: From your list of strengths, craft a concise USP. This one-sentence statement will reinforce why a customer should choose your business over another. Keep your USP specific and benefit-focused. A broadly-applicable statement may sound safe, but it won’t motivate action. Instead, hone in on your ideal customer persona and explain how you can support them.

By writing a compelling USP, you will have a powerful tool for selling your business to potential customers. And because of the direct nature of the statement, you can be sure that you are attracting the right prospects with the right expectations.

3.) Create A Data-Driven Approach

Marketing without data is like driving with your eyes closed — essentially guessing in the dark. Without measuring your efforts’ success, you won’t know how to adjust your customer acquisition strategy to push further growth.

Fortunately, there are plenty of analytics tools available today. Most digital channels have built-in data analytics capabilities, and you can supplement these with third-party solutions depending on your specific customer acquisition strategy.

For example, Facebook advertisers should take advantage of the native Facebook pixel. Shopify merchants may want to use Google Analytics and an attribution platform like TripleWhale. And SEO campaigns call for Google Search Console and a tool like Ahrefs or Moz to track rankings.

These data providers can help you better understand the performance of your customer acquisition efforts and track everything from campaigns and budgets to website visits, leads, sales, and customer behavior.

But simply gathering data is not enough. When implementing your analytics platforms, deciding which metrics are most relevant to you and your business goals is important. Beyond blended CAC, which averages your customer acquisition costs across all marketing channels, you may also want to track:

• Total website visits
• Conversion rates
• Leads generated
• Return on ad spend (ROAS)
• Channel-specific CAC

Before investing too heavily in sales and marketing, you should set performance benchmarks. That way, you can use your analytics data to measure outcomes, identify areas that need improvement, and allocate budgets accordingly.

4.) Explore Multiple Channels

Testing a wide range of marketing channels offers several benefits. Businesses can reach a broader audience, diversify their customer bases, determine which channels perform best, and create a unified customer journey.

From Facebook to LinkedIn to radio and print, there are hundreds of customer acquisition channels to choose from. To get started, here are the most popular categories to consider:

• Search engine optimization (SEO): Optimize your website performance and content to improve your visibility in search results. Build a keyword cluster, write helpful and engaging posts, and acquire white hat backlinks from relevant websites. As Google and other search engines determine that you have topical authority, your rankings and search traffic will improve.
• Paid advertising: Use targeted ads to reach a specific audience, drive website visits, and expedite the customer acquisition process. Social networks allow you to narrow your target audience based on demographics and perceived interests. Search ads are great for appearing in front of people already searching for a product or service like yours. And display ads can help to remind potential customers of unfinished purchases.
• Social media marketing: Leverage social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok to introduce users to your brand, nurture leads, and convert customers. Visual content such as lifestyle imagery, short-form videos, and influencer collaborations can help you attract attention and establish an organic presence.
• Content marketing: Create valuable content about your products or services, the problems they solve, or the industries they serve. Publish blog posts, eBooks, infographics, videos, and podcasts, and distribute them widely. The goal here is to build trust, credibility, and brand loyalty, which can lead to lower customer acquisition costs in the long run.
• Email marketing: Offer exclusive deals, discounts, or content in exchange for opt-ins to your email list. Then, send personalized emails to prospects and customers with information about upcoming promotions, new products, or industry updates. With the right copy and design, email campaigns can help you convert leads into customers at an economical CAC. But don’t forget to follow email security best practices to avoid the spam filter and protect your email list from cyber threats.

The right mix of channels will depend on your industry, market, and business model. That’s why it’s best to explore multiple channels, experiment with different tactics, and continuously monitor your results.

5.) Build Strong Partnerships

One of the most overlooked strategies for customer acquisition is to leverage the power of partnerships. This involves teaming up with other businesses, influencers, or even your own customers to access their networks and increase your reach.

Here are a few simple ways to build partnerships:

• Strategic alliances: Collaborate with another business in your industry that serves a similar target audience. You can share resources, co-brand products, or cross-promote each other’s services to tap into each other’s trusted customer bases.
• Joint ventures: Instead of simply aligning incentives, create an entirely new business in partnership with another company. Joint ventures are used to create new services, expand into new markets, or share distribution channels. This can help businesses leverage each other’s strengths, pool resources, and share common risks and rewards.
• Referral programs: Reward existing customers for referring their friends and family to your business. You can accomplish this through rewards, discounts, merchandise, exclusive events, and more. Because these referrals come from trusted sources, they often result in higher conversion rates and lower customer acquisition costs.
• Affiliate networks: Partner with influencers, marketers, and other businesses who will promote your products or services in exchange for a percentage of each sale. Affiliates can generate substantial revenue when adequately incentivized. So don’t be afraid to offer as generous of a commission as your margins allow.

Once you have a grasp on your unit economics and how much your business can spend to acquire a customer, partnerships are a great way to scale. You can set a fixed rate per customer or lead, and then quickly increase your reach by motivating others to drive customers to your business.

6.) Provide Exceptional Customer Service

Customer service plays a crucial role in your customer acquisition strategy. When customers are delighted with the service they receive, they are much more likely to return and recommend the company to others. This can create a powerful flywheel effect (in which referred customers refer more customers) and help to reduce customer acquisition costs over time.

However, poor customer service can have the opposite impact as well. Negative reviews and word-of-mouth can hurt a company’s reputation and turn potential customers away. This creates an insurmountable barrier to customer acquisition and can quickly derail growth efforts.

To provide exceptional customer service, monitor customer feedback, respond promptly to customer inquiries, have knowledgeable staff available to answer questions, and put your customer’s needs first.

These seemingly obvious tips are often neglected as companies focus on acquiring new customers rather than impressing the ones they just converted. To ensure your customer service is up to par, keep an eye on figures like CSAT, NPS, first reply time, and average resolution time.

As you improve these metrics, you can expect to see your referral rates increase and your blended CAC decrease. These are both great signs that your customer acquisition strategy is running smoothly.

7.) Iterate And Improve

Customer acquisition is never complete — it’s an ongoing process of experimentation, tracking, and iteration. Even once you crack the code on one marketing channel, the next challenges are scaling and eventually jumping to another. And just when you might feel like an expert, the industry evolves.

The only way to stay ahead of the curve and your competition is to continuously iterate and improve your customer acquisition strategy. Regularly implement A/B tests to confirm assumptions, explore new features or opportunities, and measure the impact of changes. Then, analyze the results to learn what’s working and what isn’t, and use those insights to inform your next round of tests.

Taking incremental steps forward can help you respond to changing market conditions and maximize the performance of your customer acquisition efforts.

Customer Acquisition Vs. Customer Retention

Customer acquisition is about attracting new customers, whereas customer retention focuses on keeping these existing customers loyal to the business. But acquisition marketing and retention marketing are not mutually exclusive — the two go hand-in-hand.

The more effective your retention marketing is, the more you can spend on acquisition marketing. Reducing churn and increasing the repeat purchase rate drives up customer lifetime value. And in turn, higher lifetime value can be used to justify higher customer acquisition costs.

To illustrate this point, imagine your business sells widgets for $100 each. If the fulfillment of that order costs $40 and you spend $40 to acquire a customer, you are left with $20 of profit after a customer’s first purchase. If the customer always churns after one purchase, you will continue to operate at 20% profit margins as long as your CAC remains $40. And if for any reason, your CAC were to jump to $60, your margins would compress to 0%.

On the other hand, if you were to fix your retention problems such that customers purchased an average of three times, this calculation would look quite different. Now your business brings in $300 in customer lifetime value, spends $120 on fulfillment, and can afford to spend up to $180 on CAC. You could comfortably budget $80 or $100 on customer acquisition to grow faster and capture more market share.

This simple example highlights why customer lifecycle marketing is crucial for long-term growth. You can test and optimize all you want on the acquisition side, but your financial success will always be capped without customer retention. A healthy balance between the two is essential to build a growing and profitable business.

Final Thoughts

Customer acquisition is necessary for sustainable business growth. To maximize success, you need a clear customer acquisition strategy. With the 7-step process outlined, you can create a customer acquisition machine that will propel your business to new heights!

The world of digital marketing is constantly evolving. There is always a new channel, a new strategy, or a new opportunity to pursue.

Despite this changing environment, a handful of indispensable digital marketing skills form the foundation of every effective campaign. From content marketing to data analysis, these skills can help businesses of all sizes reach new customers, convert leads, and build an online presence.

Whether you’re a marketing professional looking to stay ahead of the curve or a business owner hoping to scale your reach, this guide will cover the digital marketing skills needed to thrive in 2024 and beyond.

[table of contents]

Digital marketing is the art of promoting products or services across digital channels, including:

• Social media
• Email
• Search engines
• Websites
• Apps
• And more!

Digital marketing combines traditional marketing tactics with modern technology to help businesses reach their target audience where they are already hanging out. Businesses can build brand awareness, drive traffic, and ultimately increase sales by delivering relevant, personalized messages at the right time.

In short, digital marketing is the key to unlocking success in our increasingly digital world.

Skill 1: Content Marketing

What It Is

Content marketing involves creating and distributing helpful, engaging, or educational content to attract leads and retain customers. This content often includes blog posts, videos, e-books, infographics, white papers, and more.

How It Works

Content marketing requires a deep understanding of the target audience and their needs, questions, and objections. Once a company understands the customer’s journey, it can craft valuable and relevant content for each sales funnel step.

This specificity enables each piece of content to help build awareness, establish trust, and nudge leads up the value ladder. For example, a software company may create a 3-part video-content campaign:

• Video 1: Highlight the problem to generate engagement
• Video 2: Demonstrate the SaaS solution to gather leads
• Video 3: Run a sale to create urgency

Why It Matters

Content marketing is one of today’s most pervasive and effective digital marketing skills. Short-form videos, social media posts, and blog articles have become incredibly popular for audience-building, customer engagement, and sales. Many successful businesses have built their entire marketing strategy around content marketing and becoming trusted resources in their industries.

Skill 2: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

What It Is

SEO is the practice of optimizing a website to make it more valuable to users and attractive to search engines. This process calls for improving the content, structure, and user experience to better satisfy search intent and help webpages rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).

How It Works

Search engines use complex algorithms to index and rank website content for individual search queries. SEO works by reverse-engineering these algorithms and then making changes to improve a website’s visibility in the SERPs.

This requires optimizing on-page and off-page elements. On-page elements include page titles, meta descriptions, headings, keyword research, and content quality.

Off-page SEO requires building high-quality backlinks from relevant and authoritative websites in the same niche.

Why It Matters

SEO enables businesses to increase their online visibility and generate relatively stable traffic. SEO also helps to establish credibility and authority in a given industry, as businesses that rank higher in search results are often perceived as more trustworthy.

Although the advent of ChatGPT and other AI content tools has forced search engines to adapt their algorithms, SEO remains a viable long-term strategy for customer acquisition.

Skill 3: Email Marketing

What It Is

Email marketing is the process of building, maintaining, and monetizing an email list. You can use this “owned” marketing asset to nurture customer relationships, increase brand awareness, and directly promote product launches or service offerings. This can occur through announcements, company updates, product information, or special offers.

How It Works

Email marketing typically begins by developing an email list. This list may include previous customers, interested leads, and newsletter or blog subscribers. Collecting email addresses can be easily done by adding an opt-in box to the footer of a website or a pop-up form to landing pages.

Once the list is created, businesses can begin to draft and send emails. Email marketing supports communication across the entire customer journey, from newsletters to automated flows. This helps with fostering customer loyalty, maintaining engagement, and driving conversions.

And by leveraging the power of segmentation and personalization, marketers can consistently send the right email at the right time to produce the best results.

Why It Matters

Email marketing is one of the most valuable digital marketing skills because email is the highest ROI channel. On average, businesses generate $36 of revenue for every dollar spent on email marketing. And because customer emails are one of the only marketing assets businesses truly own, email marketing is essential for diversifying risk and reducing dependence on any one channel.

Skill 4: Social Media Marketing

What It Is

Social media marketing consists of promoting a brand, product, or service on social media platforms. This can include sharing posts, images, videos, and stories to build an audience and engage followers on apps such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and more.

How It Works

To convert social media users into customers, businesses need to identify their target audience, develop a brand voice, and create tailored content for their chosen platforms. This is because the demographics of each social app vary widely, and the same content may not work across multiple sites.

TikTok, for example, calls for fast cuts, attention-grabbing audio, and unexpected hooks to grab user attention. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is known for more professional “thought leadership” pieces. So while cross-posting from Instagram Reels to TikTok may work, doing the same for LinkedIn won’t. It’s crucial to understand these nuances and tailor social media content accordingly.

Once social media marketers crack the code on a given platform, they can also run paid campaigns to reach an even larger audience. This approach enables businesses to target specific customer personas based on behaviors and interests and craft more tailored messaging. Although social media ads can be pricey, they are one of the fastest ways to scale campaigns and drive quality leads.

Why It Matters

With billions of users worldwide, social media marketing is one of the most important digital marketing skills to master. Social media platforms offer businesses unparalleled opportunities to engage with their target audience, build brand awareness, and drive revenue.

Plus, with a wealth of data and analytics to inform decision-making, savvy marketers can test and optimize messages and creatives to maximize effectiveness.

Skill 5: Influencer Marketing

What It Is

Influencer marketing involves connecting with social media influencers and content creators in the same niche as the business. These influencers then promote products and services to their followers, who, in turn, become customers. For many businesses, influencer marketing is a viable alternative to paid social media marketing because it also helps build brand credibility and reach new audiences.

How It Works

Influencer selection is the most important part of influencer marketing. For the resulting campaign to convert well, it is critical that the promotion feels organic and natural. This requires the creator to endorse the brand and genuinely be interested in the space.

And while having a sizable audience is nice — it’s not a must. Micro-influencers tend to have deeper relationships with their followers, producing more cost-effective results.

Typical influencer partnerships include sponsored posts, reviews, product demonstrations, and giveaways. Influencers are often compensated for this work through free products, affiliate earnings, or upfront payments.

To get in touch with influencers who are often flooded with direct messages, try to stand out from the crowd. Leave a few thoughtful comments, respond to their stories, and even reach out via email if you have contact information.

Alternatively, you can ship them your product directly, without a formal agreement in place, to introduce yourself. This strategy, known as seeding, can help establish authentic relationships before getting down to business.

Why It Matters

Influencer marketing allows businesses to access specific customer segments and tap into niche markets. By working with influencers who cater to a particular audience, businesses can reach specific hard-to-target customers.

Influencers also serve as trusted intermediaries between brands and their audiences. When influencers accept a partnership and share their opinions with their followers, their credibility is on the line. In risking this, they help alleviate any customer skepticism and encourage followers to act on their recommendations. In turn, this endorsement can lead to higher conversion rates.

Skill 6: Data Analysis

What It Is

Data analysis is the practice of examining marketing data to extract actionable insights. This requires aggregating data across marketing channels, organizing it into a manageable format, and then analyzing it to better understand campaign performance, customer behavior, or overall effectiveness.

A great tool to use for Data Analysis is Google Analytics, which gives you everything you need to analyze data for your business.

How It Works

Digital businesses often use web analytics platforms like Google Analytics to record website activity. They may also use social media monitoring tools to track brand mentions and engagement and email marketing software to analyze the performance of their email campaigns.

Once this data is collected, marketers review key metrics such as:

• Click through rate
• Page views
• Conversion rate
• Customer acquisition costs
• Average engagement time
• Returning visitors

These figures directly affect other digital marketing skills, like content marketing, SEO, and social media marketing. So it is important to monitor them over time and learn how to identify causal relationships between them and the businesses’ digital marketing initiatives.

Why It Matters

Data analysis is necessary for effective digital marketing because it allows businesses to make data-driven decisions and optimize campaigns for better performance. Marketers can drive growth and allocate resources more efficiently by understanding which channels to prioritize, what messaging resonates best, and which campaigns are most successful.

Skill 7: Marketing Automation

What It Is

Marketing automation involves using software to automate tasks and increase efficiency. Rather than manually contacting every customer, automation tools enable businesses to send a timely email and SMS messages, employ targeted ads, and personalize web content at scale.

How It Works

Marketing automation tools, such as HubSpot, Klaviyo, and CoSchedule, are used to streamline repetitive processes and create automated workflows. Here are a few examples of how digital businesses can use marketing automation:

• Capture and manage new leads
• Automatically send welcome emails
• Trigger an email sequence after specific actions or milestones
• Schedule social media posts in advance
• Personalize communication based on demographics, behavior, or interests
• Track and analyze campaign performance
• Integrate with other automation tools

These platforms allow marketers to design and implement complex campaigns that nudge customers through the sales funnel and tactically overcome objections. This improves the customer experience and results in cheaper customer acquisition costs.

Why It Matters

Marketing automation drives greater ROI by guiding customers through the purchase journey without using any additional resources. By automating key processes, marketers can focus on more creative and strategic aspects of their work. And when implemented effectively, marketing automation leads to increased engagement, conversion rates, and customer loyalty.

Skill 8: Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

What It Is

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the process of improving the performance of a webpage based on historical data. The goal of CRO is to increase the percentage of website visitors that take a desired action, such as placing an order or completing a contact form. Through the use of heat maps and A/B tests, marketers can make it easier for visitors to convert into customers one step at a time.

How It Works

CRO involves analyzing website data to identify areas where visitors may be experiencing friction or obstacles that prevent them from taking action. Some common areas to focus on include website layout, navigation, copywriting, and design. Once potential issues have been identified, marketers can implement changes and measure their effectiveness with A/B or multivariate testing.

A/B testing involves creating two versions of a webpage with different elements, such as a headline or call-to-action button, and then randomly showing each version to a subset of visitors. The version that results in more conversions is then implemented on the website.

Multivariate testing is similar to A/B testing but involves tweaking multiple elements on a webpage simultaneously to determine the optimal combination.

Why It Matters

CRO has a direct impact on the profitability of a business. By improving the conversion rate of a digital marketing campaign, businesses enjoy greater sales with the samemarketing spend and cost structure. Plus, because website users get a smoother, more enjoyable digital experience, CRO also contributes to retention and referral marketing.

Businesses must equip themselves with diverse digital marketing skills to adapt to the changing landscape and achieve success online. From content marketing to email marketing to CRO, these capabilities are essential to creating effective campaigns that drive business growth.

With new tools and strategies popping up constantly, it’s important to stay up to date and capitalize on emerging opportunities. So whether you’re a seasoned pro or just starting out, keep on learning and growing. The future of digital marketing awaits!

CoSchedule provides hundreds of actionable resources for marketers, and the library grows every day! This content continues to help marketers improve their marketing strategy, level up their processes, and create exceptional content that drives results.

In this post, you will find quick-links to our entire library of free marketing resources, including:

• CoSchedule Product Guides – Learn how to use CoSchedule products to organize your marketing in one place.
• Marketing Hub – Access comprehensive topic hubs that cover the following topics:
  • Marketing
  • Marketing Ideas
  • Marketing Strategy
  • Content Marketing
• Free Tools – Level up your marketing with free marketing tools built by CoSchedule:
  • Marketing Calendar Free
  • Headline Analyzer Studio
  • Email Subject Line Tester
  • Social Message Optimizer
• More Resources from CoSchedule
  • Marketing Trend Report
  • Power Tips
  • Support Docs
  • Actionable Marketing Institute
  • CoSchedule YouTube Channel
  • CoSchedule Blog

CoSchedule Product Guides

New to CoSchedule Calendar products? Check out these product guides during onboarding to get the most out of your CoSchedule Calendar.

Explore All Product Guides

New to Marketing Calendar? Start here. This guide will show you how to build your calendar, so you can plan & execute your marketing.	Learn how to collaborate with your team, spend less time coordinating work, & level up your social strategy with Marketing Calendar Pro.	Explore the robust features of CoSchedule Marketing Suite. Learn how to customize your calendar, manage your team, and use integrations.
A guide for new users to learn about CoSchedule Marketing Calendar & Suite, why your team is using it, and how your new marketing calendar can help solve problems.	Learn how to use ReQueue to drive more traffic to your site while spending less time managing your social channels.	This guide is for agencies & freelancers ready to use CoSchedule Marketing Calendar to coordinate & execute client projects.

Tip: Access the CoSchedule guides directly in your Marketing Calendar

Marketing Hub

Elevate your marketing with the most comprehensive marketing library on the Web.

Marketing

Learn the fundamentals that every marketer needs to know along with resources that will get you started.

In this hub, you will in-depth topics such as:

• Marketing Fundamentals
• Marketing Resources
• Marketing Disciplines
• And much more!

Learn More

Marketing Ideas

Need inspiration for your next great marketing campaign? Check out Marketing Ideas Hub. From basics to tactics, discover a huge list of ideas that will increase sales, drive engagement, and get people to LOVE your company.

Find marketing ideas for your:

• Specific industry
• Social media campaigns
• Content marketing
• Holiday marketing strategy
• Seasonal marketing strategy
• Marketing activities (social media, events, content, product, video, advertising, etc).
• And much more!

Get Inspiration

Marketing Strategy

The only in-depth resource you need for your marketing strategy. Strengthen your marketing strategy with templates, how-tos, tactics, examples, and much more.

Learn important topics such as:

• Creating a Marketing Plan
• Setting Business Goals
• Target Market and Marketing Personas
• Branding
• Measuring Marketing Goals
• And much more!

Get Started

Content Marketing

Have questions about content marketing? See how to build a content marketing strategy that will attract, engage, and retain an audience.

Learn all about content marketing:

• Purpose and Benefits
• Types of Content Marketing
• Creating a Content Marketing Funnel
• Develop a Content Roadmap
• Measure Success

Learn More

Free Tools

Additional Product Resources

Need additional help? Use the following sites to find exactly what you need.​​

See how real teams use CoSchedule’s most powerful features to improve their workflows, organize projects, elevate their social strategy, and manage their team.	Use CoSchedule’s self-serve knowledge base to search popular help topics and how-to articles to answer all your CoSchedule product questions.	Subscribe for everything CoSchedule: marketing strategy, guides, tips, product updates, tutorials, and more!

More Resources​

Stay up to the date with the latest trends and find the most useful how-to content on the Web to make you a better marketer.	CoSchedule’s Trend Report on Marketing Strategy uncovers how successful marketers around the world work. Review the report to help you improve your own strategy.	Get fluff-free training that drives real results. Actionable Marketing Institute Pro has 30+ on-demand courses on content marketing, SEO, social media, & more!

Looking for a fresh way to market your ideas? Create titles that capture attention with the Online Course Title Generator—a helpful resource for naming your next big idea.

When you’re ready to go beyond traditional marketing tactics and run complex, multi-channel marketing campaigns, you’ll want to invest in a marketing workflow software solution.

This handy tool simplifies and automates management processes, keeping you on top of your marketing campaigns without surprises like unexpected budget overruns and poor campaign tracking.

So what’s the catch? Too many choices.

You have several options to choose from, each suitable for different use cases. But that’s where we come in. After days of research, chats with industry experts, and company deep dives, we present our top picks for the best marketing workflow software.

But first, the basics.

[table of contents]

[content_upgrade_shortcode]

It outlines what to do and when based on a set of rules and requirements, to complete marketing tasks and operations without errors. It can be granular or high-level, depending on the company or task—and it can be a checklist, how-to, spreadsheet, visual diagram, or flowchart.

You customize your marketing workflows as you deem fit.

You can use this software to:

• Design an automated system for long-term marketing campaigns
• Build a unified database with streamlined lead generation and data management
• Create forms, requests, tasks, and sub-tasks

Notice how these tasks are generally time-consuming and repetitive. With marketing workflow software, you can automate them to reduce errors, cut unnecessary costs, improve team collaboration, and drive business performance.

Feature diversity and effectiveness are the keys to identifying the best marketing workflow solution for your needs. While the number of features depends on your pricing plan, we recommend choosing a solution that offers these features:

1. Campaign Management

Marketing workflow software with campaign management abilities lets you centralize all your marketing campaigns.

You can create a campaign timeline, set goals and deliverables, finalize budgets, and track progress from a single place. Campaign management is also useful to segment your audience based on specific criteria (for example, behavior, location, and interests) and personalize your campaign’s messaging to better resonate with your target audience.

2. Project Management

As a marketer, you can use project management features to plan projects and outline goals, objectives, timelines, deadlines, and milestones for each. Plus, as everything is centralized and transparent, there’s minimal confusion, with everyone involved working towards a common goal.

Maybe your company is launching a new product and wants to create a comprehensive marketing campaign to promote it.

Using marketing workflow software’s project management features, you can meticulously plan your campaign- social media posts, blog posts, advertising, and newsletters—and include details like task deadlines and assignees.

3. Task Management

Marketing campaigns are getting increasingly complex and multi-faceted. There’s much to do, from researching target audiences to creating content and graphics and analyzing campaign metrics.

Task management lets you organize and complete tasks to manage complex marketing campaigns and achieve better results. Create task lists for different campaign stages, delegate tasks to and collaborate with team members, and set deadlines to track progress. You can also categorize and prioritize tasks by urgency or importance.

4. Task Automation

Task automation streamlines marketing campaigns by automating task movement between team members based on predefined criteria. Think: reaching a specific stage in the marketing process or completion of a task.

Continuing with our previous example, let’s assume your marketing team is creating a social media campaign to promote the new product.

Your team will mainly comprise of designers, copywriters, social media managers, and data analysts who work together to create, schedule, and monitor social media posts. Using task automation, you can create a workflow automating the movement of these tasks from one team member to another based on predefined criteria.

For instance, if the designer completes creating graphics for a social media post, they can mark the task as ‘Completed.‘ The workflow will automatically move the task to the copywriter, who will then write the post’s copy. Once the copywriter marks the task as complete, it’ll go on to the next person as defined by you.

In this case, task automation eliminates the need for manual handoffs, creating accountability and reducing the risk of errors.  This process gives team members more time to focus on relevant tasks and streamlines the workflow.

5. Proofs, Approvals, & Compliance

You’re likely aware of the innumerable approval and compliance blocks that often plague marketing campaigns, leading to bottlenecks and delays. By providing a transparent and centralized platform for collaboration, feedback, and sign-off, marketing workflow software helps boost efficiency and quality control in your campaigns.

Your marketing materials will be accurate, compliant, and on-brand, thanks to automated proofs, approvals, and compliance. These features also streamline the review process, reducing errors, inconsistencies, or legal issues that could damage your organization’s reputation or credibility.

6. Project Views

If you want a visual representation of your data and tasks, you need marketing workflow software that lets you “view“ your tasks in different formats, like Calendar, Kanban, Gantt, Table, and Team Views.

For example, when working on a social media campaign, you can use:

• Calendar View to set important dates like content creation deadlines and social media post schedules.
• Kanban View to manage the content creation process, assign tasks, and track progress.
• Gantt View to visualize the campaign timeline and ensure all tasks are completed promptly.
• Table View for tracking engagement metrics like click-through rates, ROI, and conversion rates.
• Team Views to communicate and share information and feedback with team members.

Views provide unique perspectives on your campaign data, helping you better manage workflows and make informed decisions to achieve your marketing goals.

What do the prospective marketing workflow software’s feature set and functionality look like? Is it easy to use and within budget? Does it integrate with other tools and allow for customization?

These are all crucial considerations when looking for marketing workflow software—but they’re also—for the lack of a better word—basic and obvious. You still might find it difficult to make the right choice.

It’s why we dug deeper and reached out to experts with years of experience in marketing management. Based on their input, we used the following selection process when evaluating marketing workflow tools:

1. Built For Marketers

Is the marketing workflow software designed for marketers?

You’ll find several general-use project management tools with tons of features. But, most of the time, these aren’t tailored to meet a marketer’s unique needs.

Our top recommendations are marketing-specific solutions that offer marketing automation, campaign management, lead tracking, and other marketing-specific functionalities essential for various marketing-specific use cases like email marketing, paid search, and content marketing.

2. Robust Task Management Functionality

Does the marketing workflow software have advanced task management capabilities?

Robust task management helps you track all the tasks in your marketing projects, from task assignments to task dependencies to deadline tracking. It’s crucial the tool assigns accountability, streamlines handoff among multiple team members and departments, and sends timely notifications with little to no involvement on your part.

3. Superior Workflow Visibility

What level of insight does the marketing workflow software offer into workflows?

Tools with a user-friendly and intuitive dashboard show the status of all projects and tasks at a glance and display key metrics and KPIs for informed decision-making. Also, find out if you can see a history of all the changes made to a project or task. This will help you track progress, identify potential bottlenecks, and recognize team member contributions.

4. Collaboration Tools

Does the marketing workflow software facilitate easy and convenient collaboration?

Effective collaboration is essential in any marketing workflow, so looking for tools with solid collaboration features is a no-brainer. Besides traditional collaboration tools like file sharing, commenting, and real-time chat, ensure you can also create and add notes or comments to each task and sub-task.

5. Reporting & Analytics

Does the workflow management software have powerful reporting and analytics?

Robust reporting and analytics let you generate custom reports and dashboards to gain valuable insights into key metrics like campaign performance and lead conversion rates. You also get analytics on individual tasks and projects to track employee performance over time and identify improvement areas.

Based on these features, we shortlisted the following tools sure to meet your organization’s unique marketing requirements:

1. CoSchedule Marketing Suite

Source

CoSchedule Marketing Suite is designed to help your team perform to its full potential while saving time and money. With a suite of marketing products at your disposal, you can easily coordinate your teams and processes to deliver projects faster.

The suite includes a Calendar Organizer to visualize every project in real-time and a Content Organizer to eliminate content bottlenecks from idea to promotion. Additionally, a Work Organizer helps implement consistent, defined workflows to increase output, while the Asset Organizer lets you catalog and maintain all campaign files and assets in one place.

2. CoSchedule Marketing Calendar

Source

Another excellent product from CoSchedule, the free Marketing Calendar, provides real-time visibility into your marketing campaigns.

Add all projects, tasks, ideas, and other marketing assets to organize and view everything on the same page. Not only does this give you more clarity into your projects and reconfirm priorities, but it also eliminates the need for back-and-forth emailing and messy spreadsheets.

You can also create, schedule, and publish social campaigns and analyze their results using social reports to track and share progress.

3. HubSpot Marketing Hub

Source

HubSpot Marketing Hub allows you to plan, manage, and track campaigns across multiple channels within unified dashboards.

One of its most notable features is the platform’s built-in CRM. You can store and view lead data from multiple marketing touchpoints and use these details to create hyper-specific audience segments.

HubSpot’s workflow automation and personalization tools then use the said details to adjust your campaigns’ assets to each and every segment across all channels.

4. Optimizely

Source

Optimizely allows you to create a dedicated workspace to ensure alignment at every marketing campaign stage.

Store all assets and content details, including dedicated briefs, to publish and promote new content on a recurring schedule. You can also grant access user by user, ensuring each contributor focuses on matters relevant to them. Customizable task management and workflows let you adapt your approach to ensure brand compliance and consistency and avoid missed deadlines.

Other features like real-time team collaboration, a content analytics dashboard, and in-task publishing and distribution further drive efficiency.

5. Storyteq

Source

Storyteq’s primary purpose is to help you tell meaningful stories that resonate with your target audience at scale.

It offers a wide range of features to define project objectives, deliverables, budget, and timeline, as well as assign tasks and set deadlines. Turn your master file into an on-brand dynamic template and render multiple creative assets in batches. Note that Storyteq can also auto-optimize your content for a variety of channels, which is another time-saving benefit.

Then track costs, content usage, and performance throughout your marketing campaign to make adjustments as necessary.

6. Workamajig

Source

Built for marketers, Workamajig offers a centralized CRM and database to centralize all campaign-related assets and information, including tasks, calendars, conversations, timelines, and notifications.

This is useful to reduce miscommunication risks and ensure everyone on the team is working towards achieving a common goal. The real-time daily feed provides superior workflow visibility, which with the wide range of reporting options, keeps you on top of campaign progress.

Other desirable features include robust vendor management and customizable templates to create detailed and accurate campaign estimates.

7. Adobe Workfront

Source

With Adobe Workfront, you can approach marketing with strategic insight instead of guesswork.

Get complete visibility into work context and status, along with efficient asset storage and management, that streamlines project planning and execution. You can also define goals and map project requests while effectively planning and prioritizing tasks.

Automated workflows, templates, agile boards, and real-time reports make uncovering and implementing valuable insights to drive team efficiency and collaboration easier.

8. ClickUp

Source

ClickUp is an excellent team and stakeholder collaboration and task visualization tool.

It has features to help you implement marketing campaigns and draw connections between tasks. You can also schedule reminders and track initiatives to ensure efficient workload management.

A ton of relevant templates, including A/B testing, promotional calendar, and campaign tracking, are great for avoiding errors and realizing results faster.

9. Hive

Source

Hive gives you all the tools you need to succeed in marketing in one place.

With Project Navigator, you can easily keep track of project status, deadlines, and team members. Robust project and task management features align your team stays on the same page, while its excellent analytics let you uncover high-level insights and monitor progress.

Hive also offers specialized marketing tools like Hive Automate to send automated reminders and updates, and a Resourcing app to manage team workload.

These marketing workflow tools will help you define and automate the steps to build and execute strong marketing campaigns. From effective task planning and management to streamlining processes for smooth running marketing campaigns, you can rely on them to leverage the power of workflows and achieve your marketing goals faster and with less effort.

10. Typeface

Source

Typeface is a generative AI platform designed for enterprise content creation, offering marketing teams the ability to craft targeted, on-brand content for every stage of the customer journey, ad campaign, and website.

With capabilities in deep personalization, integrated workflows, and enterprise-grade safety, Typeface empowers Fortune 500 companies across diverse industries to speed up production, achieve personalization on a large scale, and enhance multi-channel campaign effectiveness.

By collaborating with industry leaders like Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce, Typeface provides comprehensive AI-first content workflows throughout the entire AI and MarTech ecosystem.

Want to get started with TikTok influencer marketing for your business?

Set the foundation for your TikTok influencer marketing strategy with this guide to improve your brand’s awareness, credibility, and conversion rates.

[table of contents]

What Is TikTok?

What Is TikTok Influencer Marketing?

You might be thinking: Out of all the social media platforms to market for, why try influencer marketing on TikTok?

Take a look at the benefits of applying a TikTok influencer marketing strategy to discover if TikTok marketing is for your business:

1. Increase Your Chances Of Going Viral

About 10% of small businesses that use TikTok go viral. TikTok’s algorithm recommends content to users based on user preferences – likes, following, and interactions – to boost video views.

The publicity from TikTok’s viral content increases website traffic and brand awareness.

2. Improve Your Brand’s Credibility

90% of consumers of all ages would trust an influencer over a celebrity. Followers trust the expertise of an influencer’s opinion to build a brand’s credibility.

3. Reach Your Target Audience Directly

Select an influencer in your niche to target your market audience. Target your audience to increase conversion rates and move leads down the sales funnel.

4. Boost Profits With TikTok Influencers

On average, businesses and brands earn $5.20 for every dollar they spend on influencer marketing. The return on investment (ROI) from TikTok influencer marketing increase conversions and boosts sales.

Take a look at the average cost per TikTok video based on the influencer tiers:

Use a TikTok influencer to promote your business’s products or services. Get started running your TikTok influencer marketing campaign with these 4 steps:

1. Identify Your Target Audience

Does your target audience use TikTok? Or are you targeting a new audience on TikTok? Create personas to determine your target audience.

Build your marketing campaign strategy on your target audience’s interests to find the right influencers and create discoverable content.

2. Determine Your Niche

The TikTok algorithm shares content with audiences based on their interests. Discover your niche to align your content with your audience’s interests.

Conduct a hashtag search to identify your niche. TikTok’s Creative Center allows you to discover ranking hashtags based on your industry.

3. Find Your Influencer

Research TikTok influencers to reach your target audience and create desired content.

Connect with TikTok creators using Creator Marketplace to discover influencers for your brand.

Source

4. Create Promotional TikTok Content

Build a content strategy that boosts your influencer marketing campaign. Create viral content within your niche to reach your audience and expand the number of viewers.

Analyze your goals with key performance indicators (KPI) to measure the performance of your TikTok influencer marketing strategy goals. Use a TikTok influencer marketing strategy to complete these main goals:

1. Brand Awareness

The average organic reach for brands on TikTok is about 118%. TikTok’s algorithm promotes content rather than boosting paid advertisements to reach the 1 billion monthly active users.

Analyze brand awareness KPIs to determine the influencer’s effectiveness in reaching new customers.

TikTok Analytics allows you to analyze brand awareness metrics to calculate the level of familiarity customers have with your brand.

Source

2. Conversions

TikTok’s average conversion rate is around 3.4%. Track your influencer’s conversion rate to gauge the success of their TikTok campaigns and drive viewers down the marketing funnel.

Analyze conversion KPIs to determine the influencer’s effectiveness in converting social media viewers to customers.

Inspire your TikTok influencer marketing strategy by looking at brands already using the platform successfully.

Trend Videos

1. Gymshark

Gymshark is a fitness apparel and accessories brand that uses TikTok influencers to market its products. Influencers create fitness trend videos in their Gymshark apparel to boost brand awareness.

Gymshark repurposes creator content on their TikTok to increase their online presence.

Source

2. Duolingo

Duolingo is a technology company that creates learning apps. The notorious owl mascot is considered a TikTok influencer, posting trending content on the brand’s page.

The owl’scontent on Duolingo’s TikTok attracts new customers with content that consistently goes viral.

Source

3. Bloom Nutrition

Bloom Nutrition produces supplements and uses TikTok to increase product sales. Bloom pays influencers to create trendy videos on their accounts.

Source

Educational Content

4. Fenty Beauty

Fenty Beauty is a cosmetics brand that markets its products on TikTok with educational makeup videos. These educational videos enhance the audience’s understanding of products to increase brand loyalty.

Rihanna, Fenty Beauty CEO and influencer, educates followers on how to use the brand’s products.

Source

5. Spikeball

Ever wonder how Spikeball became so popular? Spikeball has 1.2M followers on TikTok and is now a household game.

Spikeball uses its TikTok platform to inform followers about the game and increase product sales. The brand uses professional Spikeball players as influencers to teach others how to play.

Source

6. Chipotle

Chipotle creates educational content videos to establish the brand’s expertise in the restaurant industry.

Source

Influencer, Nick Digiovanni, shows how to make the chipotle vinaigrette on Chipotle’s account.

Series Content

7. Dunkin

Dunkin is a coffee chain that uses video series with famous influencers to promote the brand.

Charli D’Amelio has 149.9M followers on TikTok and has been featured in a series on Dunkin’s TikTok page.

Source

8. NBA

The NBA’s TikTok account hosts a series of mic’d-up content. Basketball influencers with a high following promote the association to gain NBA fans.

Source

9. Calvin Klein

Calvin Klein is a fashion label that uses a hashtag series on TikTok to boost brand awareness. Influencers post TikTok videos using #mycalvins to encourage audience engagement.

Source

What Is TikTok’s Demographic?

21.5% of TikTok’s global audience are women between the ages of 18 and 24 years.

Source

What Should I Send The Influencer?

TikTok content is designed to be user-controlled and short-form. Allow the influencer to be the expert in their field but be sure to share some specific goals if you have them.

Items To Outline For An Influencer:

• Write out the main goal to establish a cohesive strategy.
• Share any specific talking points you would like the influencer to discuss in the content.
• Outline a timeline for the influencer to follow.

 

Use CoSchedule’s Marketing Calendar to schedule a marketing campaign with an influencer. Create, schedule, and publish social campaigns to promote your influencer marketing initiatives.

Looking to streamline your marketing operations and increase performance?

The right marketing operations software can transform how your team manages campaigns, automates workflows, and measures success. In this guide, you’l learn how to choose the ideal tools and features to support your business goals.

[table of contents]

What Are Marketing Operations?

What Is Marketing Operations Management?

What Makes Great Marketing Operations Software?

Marketing operations software is the technology used to oversee marketing efforts and measure the performance of your marketing strategy. But what makes each software unique? The features.

Take a look at these necessary features to find the optimal software for your marketing team:

1. Team Collaboration & Management

Implement software that allows your team to collaborate on projects and manage workflows. Team collaboration and marketing management features improve communication and productivity across the department.

2. Project Management

A project management component ensures your team achieves every marketing deadline and goal. Manage your team’s marketing projects with software to boost efficiency and productivity.

3. Reporting

Use marketing operations software that shares reports – metrics, reports, and workflow dashboards with stakeholders. Keep stakeholders informed with real-time insights on data and marketing actions to prove your team’s value.

4. Process & Workflow Automation

Process and workflow automation streamlines assigning marketing tasks. Incorporate software with process and workflow automation to enhance performance and reduce errors.

5. Integrations

Adopt marketing operations software that connects with other third-party applications. Integrations connect all your tools in one place to access data and improve efficiency.

6. Human Resources Management

Use software that allows your human resources team to oversee employee activities. Utilize a human resource management software to improve the employee’s experience.

7. Document Management

Document management software stores, manages, and tracks the company’s electronic assets. Use a marketing operations software with document management to access consistent information across every department.

8. Customer Relationship Management

Customer relationship management (CRM) software enables businesses to maintain information about customers and leads. Find software with CRM features to manage customer relationships and identify customer needs.

Marketers focus on the strategy and creativity of marketing operations. Allow the software to handle the execution and measurement of your marketing initiatives.

Check out our top picks for software to manage your marketing operations:

1. CoSchedule Marketing Suite

Category: Project Management and Reporting

For marketers with complex marketing operations needs, CoSchedule Marketing Suite helps busy teams complete more work, deliver projects on time, and prove their value to stakeholders.

Source

Top Features

• Calendar Organizer: Visualize every project on a unified calendar to keep stakeholders “in the know” and manage marketing requests.
• Content Organizer: Optimize your editorial process to eliminate content bottlenecks and deliver more content.
• Work Organizer: Implement workflows to maximize production and increase output
• Asset Organizer: Catalog and control brand assets to share files securely with shareholders.

Plans & Pricing

Marketing Suite is a flexible platform a customer success team creates for its customers, depending on the functionality you need. With Marketing Suite, you can organize all of your marketing in one place. Schedule your demo here.

CoSchedule offers a forever-free plan called Marketing Calendar that you can create now. Premium functionality such as team task management, customizable task workflow templates, and unlimited social media scheduling is available for Marketing Calendar starting at just $29 per user per month.

Accolades

• CoSchedule’s Marketing Suite has been named High Performer by G2 for 20 consecutive quarters.
• Forbes Advisor has recognized this product among the Best Project Management Software & Tools.
• CoSchedule is declared a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Marketing Platforms.

2. Trello

Category: Workflow Management & Team Collaboration

Trello is a visual operations tool that uses Kanban techniques to organize your workflow for any project.

Source

Top Features

• Butler Automation: Cards move across lists to show completion status.
• Templates: Use blueprints to group your boards, lists, and cards to fit your team’s objectives.
• Power-Ups: Add Power-Ups to your boards to build personalized workflows.

Plans & Pricing

Trello offers a free 14-day trial of Trello Premium, including workspace views, access to create unlimited boards, and security features. Trello Premium is $10 per user per month after your trial.

Trello Premium is best for teams to track multiple projects and visualize work. Free, standard, premium, and enterprise plans are available based on the size of your team and the features you wish to include. Check out these plans on the Trello Pricing Page.

Accolades

• Trello was honored by The Webby Awards as the People’s Voice Winner.
• G2 recognized this product as a Leader in collaboration tools.

3. Slack

Category: Communication & Collaboration

85% of teams say Slack has improved communication. Slack connects teams, unifies systems, and drives businesses forward.

Source

Top Features

• Channels: Organize all of your work communication into central spaces for conversations and tools.
• Integrations: Connect Slack with additional services like Google Drive, Office 365, and more.
• Enterprise Key Management: Control and access company data with your encryption keys.

Plans & Pricing

Slack provides four pricing options: Free, Pro, Business+, and Enterprise+. Business+ is recommended for mid-sized companies and costs $18 per month.

The Business+ plan offers unlimited channels, user management, and data exports for all messages. Contact the Slack Help Center to troubleshoot your questions.

Accolades

• Slack won Fastest Winning Startup at the Crunchies.
• Comparably awarded Slack with the Best Company eNPS.
• G2 named Slack in the Top 50 Best Business Instant Messaging Services.

4. Zapier

Category: Process & Workflow Automation

Zapier automates your workflows across over 5,000 integrations to customize your work and create flexible processes.

Source

Top Features

• Zaps: Build multiple Zaps to create workflows that perform actions from one trigger.
• Paths: Create paths to pivot your team’s dynamic workflow.
• Webhooks: Retrieve data and send requests without writing any code.
• Formatter: Format dates, text, and more to reflect your workflow.

Plans & Pricing

Zapier offers 4 plans for consumers based on their needs and company size: Free, Pro, Team, and Enterprise. Zapier provides a 14-day free trial of the Professional plan; after that, the Professional plan is $19.99 per month when billed annually.

The Zapier Professional plan has access to unlimited premium apps, multi-step Zaps, Webhooks, and email and live chat support along with the faeatures from the free plan. View the Plans and Pricing Page for more information on the right plan for you.

Accolades

• Zapier was honored with Overall SaaS Platform Category Winner by APPEALIE.
• InfoWorld awarded Zapier with one of the Technology of the Year Awards.
• G2 named Zapier the Best Productivity Bots Software.

5. ZenDesk

Category: Customer Support

Zendesk provides the complete customer service experience to meet consumers’ needs and set your team up for success.

Source

Top Features

• Ticketing System: A centralized hub for all your customer’s requests, concerns, and questions.
• Messaging and Live Chat: Add messaging to all your platforms for customers to reach your team easily.
• Knowledge Base: Creates a searchable database for your users to view content in a help desk format.
• AI Chatbots: Use artificial intelligence to provide endless customer support and reduce manual support.

Plans & Pricing

Zendesk for service offers four total plans. The most popular plan is the Suite Professional, which is $115 per agent per month if billed annually.

Zendesk’s Suite Professional plan provides a live agent activity dashboard, private conversation threads, and customizable dashboards. Look at the pricing plans to discover a plan for your customer support team.

Accolades

• Zendesk is in the Top 50 Collaboration Products via G2.
• Comparably awarded Zendesk with several awards over multiple years that include:  Best Company Culture, Best CEO, Best Company Leadership, and Best Company Outlook.
• This product was honored with The Webby Tech For Good Stories Award.
• Zendesk won the Wisconsin Innovation Award for its customer service and help desk software.

6. Salesforce

Category: Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Salesforce makes cloud-based software to help companies discover more leads, close more deals, and provide customer service. Salesforce’s Customer 360 product unites service, sales, IT, marketing, and commerce teams with a shared view of client information.

Source

Top Features

• Genie Customer Data Cloud: Personalize the customer experience with this automation intelligence tool to give your team a view of all customer data.
• Marketing Cloud: Automate content across multiple channels to save time and increase engagement.
• Service Cloud: Personalize every engagement with artificial intelligence and scale services with automation.

Plans & Pricing

Salesforce personalizes its prices based on the specific features that you are purchasing.  For example, Service Cloud pricing is separate from Marketing Cloud pricing.

For Salesforce’s customer relationship management aspect, let’s look at the Service Cloud pricing. Service Cloud pricing offers five plans: Starter Suite, Pro Suite, Enterprise Suite, Unlimited, and Agentforce 1 Service. Enterprise is the most popular customizable CRM, which is priced at $175 per user per month.

Check out the pricing plans for each feature on the Salesforce Product Pricing page.

Accolades

• Salesforce was honored with Best Mobile App for Business at the GSMA Glomo Awards.
• The Stevie Awards presented this product with the Award for Innovation in Customer Service.
• This product was named Deal Crunch Editor’s Retail Choice Award for Multi-Channel Sales Unification.

7. BambooHR

Category: Human Resources Management

BambooHR provides human resource software for small and medium-sized businesses. This human resources management software collects, maintains, and analyzes employee data.

Source

Top Features

• People Data & Analytics: Store and analyze employee data – employee records, workflows, and reporting – to manage worker information.
• Applicant Tracking System: Find the right employee and improve every stage of the hiring process with this software.
• Onboarding: BambooHR adds personality and formalities to onboarding checklists.
• Payroll: A three-step process to file state and federal taxes, pay employees, and export a payroll summary report.

Plans & Pricing

BambooHR provides three plans – Core, Pro, and Elite – and optional add-on capabilities for purchase.

Get a free price quote to explore the plans and add-ons for your business on the Pricing Page.

Accolades

• BambooHR won the Stevie Silver Award for Sales & Customer Service.
• GoodFirms presented the product as The Best HR Software.
• This product was awarded Best Usability, Best Product for HR, and Highest Satisfaction by G2.

8. Xero

Category: Accounting

Xero provides cloud accounting software for accountants, bookkeepers, and businesses to store financial information.

Source

Top Features

• Expense Management Tools: Submit reimbursement claims and manage spending with this tool.
• Bank Connections: Connect your company’s bank accounts to accept payments and track expenses.
• Project and Job Tracker Software: Monitor costs and profit margins on a dashboard.
• Gusto: Calculate employee payments and deductions with this payroll feature.
• Reporting: Use Xero for file storage to share financial documents with stakeholders.

Plans & Pricing

Xero has three plans, each covering the accounting essentials: Early, Growing, and Established. Growing is the most popular plan for small businesses, priced at $47 per month.

The Xero Growing plan allows businesses to reconcile bulk transactions, send unlimited invoices, and enter unlimited bills. Check out the three pricing plans on the Xero Pricing Page.

Accolades

• Xero was noticed as The Best for In-Depth and Customizable Reporting for Non-Profits by Forbes Advisor.
• The SaaS Customer Success Award, powered by the APPEALIE awards, was provided to Xero.
• This software was voted The Best Small Business Accounting Solution by K2 Enterprises.

9. Guru

Category: Shared Knowledge Base

Guru is a knowledge management software to create, access, and update a knowledge hub for your organization.

Source

Top Features

• Collections, Boards, Groups, & Cards: Organize knowledge, content, and other information to create a single source of truth for your company.
• Integrations: Guru captures information anywhere on the web, Slack, and even Google Docs to share expertise.
• Guru AI Suggestions: Use Guru’s AI to track insights on cards, guide employees to experts within the organization, and suggest new tags.

Plans & Pricing

Guru’s pricing plans include the Free trial, All-in-one, and Enterprise packages. Try out the Free trial option for free with a 30-day trial and continue your package for $15 per user per month.

The All-in-one package allows businesses to embed Guru cards, customize the portal with their brand, and gain analytic insights. Learn more about Guru’s pricing plans here or get a quote for an Enterprise plan.

Accolades

• G2 named Guru as Top 100 Software Products.
• Guru was appointed as the Best Salesforce Tool for Content Management by Cirrus Insight.

10. Google Drive

Category: Document Management

Google Drive is an asset storage service that creates and collaborates files from any device.

Source

Top Features

• Built-in Protections: Drive provides encrypted access to your files from malware, spam, and ransomware detections.
• Google Integrations: Docs, Slides, and Sheets are additional Google applications enabling content creation.
• Google Search & AI Technology: Search capabilities and Drive search chips are embedded to find files.
• File Integrations: Store over 100 additional file types – images, PDFs, Microsoft Office files, etc. – to share with your team.

Plans & Pricing

Google Workspace offers four business pricing plans – Starter, Standard, Plus, and Enterprise – and a free personal plan. Google Workspace includes every  Google software, which includes Google Drive.

The most popular plan is the Standard plan which costs $14 per user per month. The Standard price includes 2 TB of storage per user, 150 participants for video conferencing, and security controls. Take a look at Google Workspace and the pricing plans for your business on Google’s Pricing Page.

Accolades

• Google won Brand of The Year in the software and website category from Ace Metrix.
• Comparably has ranked Google as #4 in the Tech Industry and #1 in Top Brands for Gen Z.
• T3 Awards gave Google the Most Innovative Company award.

Are you looking to score new clients and grow your business? Then you’ll need to know how to write a business proposal that wins more deals.

Your document will be one of many your prospect receives, so it’s crucial to get it right.

Did you know that business proposals are no longer won over by price alone? The top reason for losing a bid is ‘A competitor/incumbent,’ according to Loopio’s statistics.

You need to be succinct, persuasive, and follow a logical structure.

I have participated in creating hundreds of proposals throughout my marketing career. In this article, I will share my steps for writing a business proposal with specific conversion optimizations to help you close more deals.

Let’s win you new business!

[table of contents]

[content_upgrade_shortcode]

12 Steps To Write A Business Proposal

In most cases, business proposals are written in response to a prospect outreach (formally or informally solicited).

You can write yours from scratch in a Word document, from a template, or through proposal software.

If you opt for the software solution, you’ll be able to track metrics (like the number of times the proposal was opened) or set automatic reminders.

Make use of CoSchedule’s Proposal Generator that makes custom and professional proposals!

Source

Whichever method you choose, it’s good to familiarize yourself with the most commonly used sections of a business proposal.

One rookie mistake is to talk about yourself too much.

This tactic might work for press releases but flops when it comes to business proposals. The trick is to showcase relevant results you achieved with previous customers and how your new prospect will benefit from your experience.

Let’s dive deeper into audience research and the nitty-gritty of how to write a business proposal.

Step #1: Research Your Audience

Writing a business proposal will be familiar territory if you regularly write blog posts.

What both mediums have in common is the need to understand the audience and tailor the content to them.

You can easily get this information by asking targeted questions at the first few sales meetings.

Maybe you write high-converting newsletters. Use audience learnings from those campaigns to your advantage.

Additionally, you can provide an interactive client form within the proposal. These client forms have pre-populated data that helps your prospect select the right features, services, or quantities for their case.

View the Proposify website here.

The form will then automatically populate the costs accordingly.

Be sure to optimize each proposal for each organization. Reference similar use cases throughout the proposal to make yourself the most suitable choice out of all the requests for proposals.

Step #2: Design A Title Or Cover Page

Your title page or cover page is the first impression of your business proposal.

Including a cover page accounts for a 4.6% increase in conversion rate.

Not bad for a low-content page!

It should include the following elements:

• Your business name, logo, and contact information
• The prospect’s company name, logo, and contact information
• Date of submission
• Title and description of the project
• Name of the person to whom you’re submitting the proposal
• Bonus: a testimonial from one of your customers

Aim for a professional, clean, yet creative look to make the proposal stand out from all the other submissions.

Step #3: Generate A Table Of Contents

According to statistics, business proposals generally span 11 pages and are organized into 7 sections.

It’s time to leverage a handy table of contents page for easy access!

Odds are that multiple people will be involved in the decision-making process at the prospect’s company. Including a table of contents lets your prospect quickly find specific information when needed.

If you’re using Microsoft Word, you can generate this section by selecting the References tab and clicking the “Table of Contents” menu item.

In Google Docs, click Insert, then select “Table of contents.”

How you generate the table of contents section on proposal platforms may vary by software.

Step #4: Write An Executive Summary

Your Executive Summary should briefly introduce the reader to your business and how you can help them solve their problem.

This page, also sometimes called the Introduction, is the most read page in a proposal, so make sure it includes all of the necessary details that move the conversion needle.

The summary should be written in a conversational tone, avoiding jargon and buzzwords as much as possible.

Boost your credibility by listing your company’s qualifications, associations, and achievements in the form of badges or icons.

Keep it at most half a page or about 200-300 words.

Step #5: Outline A Problem & Solution

This is where you’ll outline the problem or opportunity your prospect has encountered.

Use learnings from your audience research to create a tailored solution that meets their needs.

Start with a description of the current situation, then connect it to a solution you offer. Highlight results from your past experiences and successes.

You can make it about 400-500 words but balance the page with lots of white space.

Use any of the following sales enablement elements in this section:

• Past results in the same industry
• Estimated cost and time savings
• Projected outcomes
• Images or a video (using media may result in up to 41-72% higher conversion rates, respectively)
• Supporting data from the industry
• Reviews and testimonials

Check out this page on proposals.

Business development expert Robyn Haydon says, “Customer testimonials bring your proposal to life. They show you have approached a similar contract or project in the past, and the results you achieved. And because they come from a third party, they also provide independent verification of the value of what you’re offering.”

If you’re a SaaS business, use services like G2 or TrustRadius to find relevant reviews to feature.

Read the full article on this page.

Finally, you can also reference relevant statistics or research from one of your white papers to show authority.

Are you just starting out and don’t have enough content yet? Use a widely known publication to support your case. For example, “According to Forbes’ recent study, businesses should…”

Step #6: Add A Portfolio Page

Including a portfolio of your past work is vital if you’re in the creative niche, such as graphic design, web design, or even content writing.

Highlight only your best work related to your prospect’s project. You can include your portfolio as screenshots or add a link to where you host them.

Some great external portfolio sites include Behance, Dribbble, Coroflot, and even Microsoft Sway.

Ideally, showcase 3-6 portfolio items in your business proposal.

Step #7: Create The Projected Deliverables & Timelines

The deliverables section should outline the timeline of how and when you will complete the project. Break it down by tasks, start dates, end dates, approval details, and total duration.

Support your outline with a Gantt chart which will help decision-makers visualize how long the project will take and how much time each task needs.

You can also include how often you will be communicating with your client, how long it will take to receive feedback, and how they should request changes.

Make sure the timeline is realistic and consider any holidays or other events that may delay progress.

Step #8: Provide A Cost Breakdown

No pressure, but this page may be one of the main deciding factors for your prospects choosing you.

The cost page is the second most read page in a business proposal. You need to list the project’s total cost and how it’s broken down.

• Service or product name
• Item price
• Quantity
• Taxes
• Subtotal
• Discounts (Be very careful with this tactic – data shows that discounted proposals see a 23.6% LOWER close rate)
• Total cost

If you are using a proposal platform, take advantage of the interactive pricing tables.

Being able to edit quantities (such as the number of software licenses or design versions) and opt in or out of elective items can improve your close rates by 35.8%.

Include a Next Steps paragraph here, too, with at most 3-4 steps. You can explain to your prospect what to do next and add a payment schedule.

Finally, it may be a small detail, but what you call the cost section can make a difference.

According to Better Proposals, more than half of successfully signed proposals did NOT use the word “Cost” as a title but went with a variation of “Investment,” “ROI,” or similar.

Step #9: Provide Your Terms & Conditions

This part is about protecting yourself, your business, and your clients.

Include things like payment schedules, confidentiality agreements, allowed revisions, or warranty information.

Add any costs that may arise due to a change in scope.

This place is also where to mention how and when you expect to be paid – will it be on delivery? On completion of specific milestones? What happens if they miss a payment or terminate the contract prematurely?

When I worked at an agency, we found the best length of the T&C section was about a page or a page and a half at most.

Step #10: Add an About Us Page

The About Us page is where you can make a personal connection with the prospect.

You can use some of the content from the About Us page of your website, such as the company history or mission statement.

It’s a great chance to show how you and your team are the perfect fit for their project, so make sure to include a short bio of everyone involved.

Add awards, certifications, or other relevant achievements for each team member.

Listing their experience and individual strengths can help prospects visualize how your team will approach the project.

Pro-tip: Adding a video to your business proposal can increase close rates by up to 41%.

Simply face the camera, introduce yourself, and explain how you and your team can help the prospect and how excited you are to work with them.

Step #11: Edit Your Business Proposal

On average, business proposals are viewed 7.1 times by prospects.

That’s why it’s essential to pay special attention to the editing process and ensure that you hand over a flawless, professional document.

Make a checklist for yourself to review:

• Typos
• Grammar and spelling errors
• Formatting issues
• Terms, abbreviations, or jargon that may be unclear
• The details around costs

If you don’t have the bandwidth to re-read your work with fresh eyes, consider hiring a dedicated editor for a few hours.

Pro-tip: Send your proposal already signed by your company. This way, the only thing left to do for your prospect is to sign it themselves. Proposals with e-signatures close 35% faster compared to proposals without.

Step #12: Design Your Business Proposal

If you haven’t already, now is the time to design your business proposal.

Start by applying a design theme to the proposal. If you’re using Word or PowerPoint, look for the templates or design section.

Proposal generator platforms will have their own templates you can customize.

In my experience of creating business proposals for a marketing agency, using some of the prospect’s design palette often helped us advance to the next step.

For example, we often use the prospect’s brand color to evoke a familiar look and feel.

If the prospect does not have a brand kit and you’re uncomfortable digging into a page’s source code, use a Chrome extension like the Eyedropper to extract the HEX color codes from the prospect’s website.

Pro-tip: Keep them from printing your proposal! If clients print your proposals, you decrease your chances of conversion by 88%. So, omit any print buttons.

Use CoSchedule Marketing Suite To Streamline Your Business Proposal Process

CoSchedule Marketing Suite is a family of agile marketing products that helps you coordinate your process, projects, and teams. With Marketing Suite, you can coordinate and execute your business proposal from start to finish.

1.  Create A Marketing Campaign For Your Business Proposal

Use a Marketing Campaign to document all the individual projects that need to be completed for your business proposal.

The Calendar View gives you visibility over all the project deadlines and due dates so you can move tasks and projects around based on capacity.

2. Set Up Your Business Proposal Projects

Add all the projects to the campaign that need to be completed for

Schedule your business proposal timeline and add project dates to track the completion of the whole project. View all the project deadlines for your proposal in one place.

Add Tasks

Under each project, create a list of tasks to ensure every detail is completed for the business proposal.

Include tasks in each project to create deliverables, edit sections, and approve the copy.

Attach Your Proposal

Add a Google Doc or Microsoft Word to your business proposal project.

Coordinate all the tasks required to create the proposal and allow all team members access to the proposal to make updates or ship the proposal.

Add Proposal Details To Project

Include additional business proposal details in the text editor attachment to contain clear instructions for creating content for the business proposal.

From the design ideas to stakeholders names, write information that is prevalent to the proposal for the team to access.

3. Delegate Tasks To Your Team

Assign tasks to the designated department to complete every project on time.

Set the desired completion date with each team member name under each task.

4. Save A Project Template For Your Proposal Process

Want to create more business proposals in the future? Save the entire campaign process as a project template to reuse.

Simplify the process for future business proposals by including project details like project owner, tasks, and attachments to improve efficiency.

It’s Time to Close Some Deals!

Learning how to write a business proposal is an art form.

You must provide a lot of information to the prospective client while keeping your readers engaged and interested in your offer.

It’s absolutely possible once you know what to optimize for the best results.

In summary, you should understand how the prospect perceives value, then tailor your content on how you can deliver that value.

Include your and your team members’ relevant credentials, awards, or experience to make a personal connection with the prospect.

Finally, design your proposal with the client’s brand in mind, and use interactive pricing features whenever possible. This will help speed up the process and increase close rates significantly.

Good luck! Now go out there and win those deals!

Hot take: Many people know how to write an article. But only a few know how to write articles that get read, earn their readers’ trust, and turn them into customers.

Case in point: Me.

During my early days as a marketer, I wrote hundreds of articles for clients in a freelance marketplace. But guess what? Most of these clients never returned for more articles. Why? The content wasn’t good enough. Or the blunt truth version— the content was awful.

In time, I learned, I improved, and today, I repeatedly work with some notable brands.

Check out Precious’s Linkedin for more.

Your goals may differ from mine. But whether you want to get organic leads or establish yourself as a thought leader, the ultimate aim of every article is to turn your audience into customers. And in this guide, I’ll show you how to write compelling articles that can generate your desired outcome.

[table of contents]

[content_upgrade_shortcode]

What Is An Article?

Articles are content that provides valuable information to readers. They come in various types and formats, like news stories, magazine articles, and online blog posts.

In this post, we’ll focus on how you can write articles for your website. Then, you can apply the article writing process in this guide to any article you may need to write.

Recommended: Article Summary Generator

Before we delve into the how-to of article writing, we need to go over…

The #1 Overlooked Element Of Quality Articles

Jordan Miller, an editor at Gorgias, has said, “Ideas, not sentences, are the backbone of content marketing.” Jordan isn’t the first to allude to this truth. Unfortunately, most marketers reverse the order. They pour most of their time into writing and not enough into the quality of their ideas.

Sure, the structure and clarity of your writing matter. But as Jessica Malnik said, “You can hide imperfect writing if the idea you’re sharing is strong enough.”

Weak ideas dressed up with flawless writing are like icing without the cake. They might please the eye, but they’re just sugar. And you can only eat so much sugar before you get sick. The bad news is your audience is already sick. They’re sick of shallow, look-alike content that offers no unique value.

So if you want your articles to hold their attention, start focusing on the quality of your ideas, not only on your writing.

This begs the question: How do you find unique, high-quality ideas worth writing about?

Research. Deep, exhaustive research.

Research will differentiate your content and help you drive results fast.

In the following sections, I’ll share research tips for uncovering unique insights that make your articles stand out.

How To Write An Article In Five Easy Steps

There is no set way to go from an idea to a published article. Some marketers follow a six-step process. Others follow seven steps. I use a simple five-step process. My steps include:

• Prewriting
• Planning
• Drafting
• Revising
• Editing

What happens at each stage varies from person to person. But following a writing process like this will make your life much easier.

Step 1: Prewriting

The prewriting process involves:

1. Choosing a topic that interests your audience
2. Doing preliminary research

Choose An Interesting Topic Idea

When deciding on article topics, you should find relevant ones for your business and your audience. Your audience will only read your articles if there’s something in it for them.

For instance, when I wrote this article about DreamData’s LinkedIn Strategy, I knew it would take off because employee advocacy was gaining steam on LinkedIn. People were talking about it but didn’t have a roadmap to execute it. At the least, they hadn’t uncovered the strategy of brands that use employee advocacy to win more customers.

After going live, this article became a hit and was even among the best articles of Foundation Marketing for the year.

If you’re familiar with your niche, chances are you already have some unique topic ideas. What’s left is to narrow down your ideas and prioritize what to write. Here are a few tips for generating topics ideas for your articles:

• Ask your sales team for common problems your customers have.
• Analyze your competitors’ websites to find the best articles they’ve created.
• Email your customers and ask about their biggest pain points.
• Review the comments section of other blog posts, Amazon products, forums, and YouTube videos in your niche.
• Use keyword research tools to uncover long tail terms.
• Keep your eyes peeled on social media to discover trendy topics.

Conduct Preliminary Research

Before writing a single word, conduct light topic research. How? Google your topic and read some of the content on the search engine result page.

The point of this exercise is to get familiar with the subject.

As you read the articles, ask yourself:

• What questions will a reader have in mind?
• How can I add my unique point of view to this topic?
• What important aspects of this topic remain uncovered?
• How can I write an article that’s more helpful to the reader? Can I provide better examples? Can I find expert insights?

Bottom line: You’re looking for content gaps—opportunities to improve the existing body of knowledge and craft an outstanding article.

Step 2: Planning

Without planning, you risk writing an article that has poor structure and offers no value. As the adage goes, “Anyone who fails to plan is planning to fail.”

Here’s how to plan when writing your article:

Prepare Your Outline

An outline is to an article what an architect’s design is to a building.

It’s a breakdown of your article’s core components, like the title, introduction, body, and conclusion. A detailed article outline helps you create a cohesive and well-structured piece, avoid mistakes, do less rewriting, and prevent lots of back and forth if you’re working with a client.

Recommended: Catchy Title Generator

Check out the Youtube video here.

To create your outline, include:

• Title ideas
• Goals of the article
• Who you’re writing for
• Keywords to target
• Search intent
• Headings and subheadings of the article (H2s, H3s, etc.).
• Competing content in Google
• Internal link ideas
• How your post will add more value than what’s on the SERP
• Extra resources like links to PDFs, reports, etc.

If you create an effective outline, you won’t repeatedly stop to restructure your article. Your ideas will flow perfectly, and you can confidently wave goodbye to writer’s block.

Conduct Exhaustive Research

Most articles on the web are lazy adaptations of other articles. They lack potent ideas and offer nothing different.

Do you know why? Writing articles that are unique, fresh, and original is hard work. It’s even harder when you want to write about a widely covered topic.

This is where exhaustive research, both demanding and time-consuming, shines.

When you do comprehensive research, you’ll be able to flesh out your outline, find more evidence that supports your argument, uncover quotes, and get strong anecdotes that’ll make your article outstanding.

For instance, here’s the research process I used for the DreamData post I referenced earlier.

Below are a few more tips for conducting research:

• Dive into relevant subreddits to see what professionals are saying about your topic.
• Use WayBack Machine to find historical information about a web page.
• Google the crap out of your topic and related subtopics.
• Use Advanced Twitter Search (I used it for this article).
• Request quotes from subject matter experts.
• Find podcast interviews that feature experts.
• Get data from related research reports.
• Interview subject matter experts.

Step 3: Drafting

This is where rubber hits the road.

You now have the ingredients to cook up a masterpiece.

All you need is a recipe—a set of instructions for presenting your high-quality ideas so you can prepare a delectable article.

Here’s that recipe:

1. Write a clickworthy headline
2. Write an interesting introduction
3. Conclude on a high note

Write A Clickworthy Headline

People decide whether to read your article based on the quality of your headline.

You may write the best article ever, but if the headline sucks, your audience won’t discover your content because they won’t click.

That’s why you should spend time writing and rewriting your headline. Never treat your headline as an afterthought. The more time you put into writing headlines, the better.

Here are some tips for writing headlines that readers can’t help but click:

1. Brainstorm Multiple Headline Ideas

Like gold, your best ideas are not at the top of your mind. They’re at the bottom. By writing several headlines for the same post, you force your mind to dig deep and extract the raw gold.

A helpful rule of thumb is to write at least 10 headlines.

View more from Ryan Law on his page.

And if you don’t know how to write a great headline, steal Ryan’s process.

View the tweet and more from Ryan Law here.

2. Include a Benefit

Humans are inherently drawn towards things that offer us a benefit.

So zero in on that tendency to craft an irresistible headline. The more desperate your audience is for the benefit, the better.

Take a look at this piece: How To Develop A Winning Social Media Content Strategy With a Template. This headline has two benefits. First, the reader learns how to develop a social media content strategy. Second, they walk away with a template to implement their learnings immediately.

3. Add an Element of Curiosity

Humans are also naturally curious. Once a curiosity gap is open in our minds, we become uncomfortable until it’s satiated.

An example of a curiosity-driven headline is the post:  The Email Marketing Strategy That Makes DigitalMarketer $39M+ Sales Year Over Year. Who wouldn’t want to know how a brand makes $39M+ a year?

4. Use CoSchedule’s Headline Studio

Check out more about Headline Studio.

I use CoSchedule’s Headline Studio 98% of the time. Trusted by over one million marketers, Headline Studio empowers users to write next-level headlines that get seen, clicked, and shared. It scores your headline on a scale of 1 to 100 based on multiple criteria, including length, sentiment, SEO, word count, etc.

Read more about using Headline Analyzer.

When using Headline Studio, aim for a score of 70 and above. This is the sweet spot for outperforming competing headlines.

5. Copy Proven Headline Templates

Decades of research have revealed which headlines work best. There’s no use reinventing the wheel. Just lean into what works.

The two most successful headline types are how-to and list headlines.

Here are a few CoSchedule headlines we’ve written using these structures:

How-to Headline Structure

• How To Write A Press Release: Free Templates, 45 Examples, & Formatting Tips
• How To Write the Best About Us Page (With 50+ Examples & A Free Template)
• How to Write the Best Blog Posts For Your Audience That Get Tons of Traffic
• How to Write White Papers Customers Want [Templates + Examples]
• How To Write A Newsletter That Converts

List Headline Structure

• 40 Awesome Marketing Ideas to Grow Your Business
• 31 Flyer Ideas To Get Your Brand Noticed Every Time
• 21 Content Ideas To Get Your Creative Juices Flowing
• 16 Content Marketing Metrics: A Guide To Adopt Successful KPIs
• 28 Marketing Strategy Examples: Proven Methods & Tactics From Top Brands

Write An Interesting Introduction

An excellent introduction is like a good pickup line.

If you nail it, you make a great first impression, and your conversation starts on a high note.

But blow it, and your conversation ends before it even starts.

For your website, that means people will click your post and bounce within seconds. You don’t want that.

If someone is reading your introduction, chances are they’re sold on the promise of your headline. Your introduction aims to build on that promise and ensure they keep reading.

Multiple approaches exist for writing article introductions. Regardless of the approach, most introductions have these underlying elements:

1. They provide a high-level overview of the article.
2. They make a compelling case for a visitor to read on.
3. They show what the article will empower the reader to achieve.

So how do you apply these thoughts when writing introductions? One method is to use the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis framework.

Popularized by Ryan Law, a thesis is a popular and widely held viewpoint. An antithesis is a viewpoint that challenges the thesis by highlighting its problems. The synthesis is a viewpoint that resolves the problems.

This approach to writing introductions is persuasive because it allows you to state your points using what the reader already knows.

For example, in the introduction to this article about best email testing tools, I started by sharing a popular email stat—thesis.

Next, I stated that the distribution of email ROI isn’t even—antithesis. Afterward, I shared my reasons for the uneven distribution—synthesis.

Check out the Nutshell website for more.

Conclude On A High Note

You’ve written a strong headline, hooked them with your introduction, and held them with your well researched body section. Your conclusion is your ‘mic drop’ moment.

The most common approach to writing conclusions is summarizing an article’s points. Ditch that. It’s predictable, boring, and wasteful. The better way is to write conclusions that inspire action and leave the reader excited and satisfied.

You want your audience to brim with smiles, happy about the great ideas they’ve read and the memorable experience they had.

Lofty goal? Yes. But use it as your north star.

Erica Schneider, Head of Content at Grizzle, puts it this way, “Treat conclusions as an extension of the introduction. Think of them like two puzzle pieces that fit together. This small mindset shift alone will help you write better conclusions.”

View the Twitter page here.

Step 4: Revising

It’s essential to recognize that a first draft is just that—a first draft! Not a final draft. It’s not supposed to be perfect.

“Very often, the people you think of as good writers are terrible writers on their first drafts. But here’s their secret: They are excellent editors of their own work,” says Ann Handley.

As a self-editor, your job is to turn your messy draft into something presentable.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when doing this:

• Step away from your piece for a few hours or a day: This enables you to view your work with fresh eyes and catch mistakes you wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.
• Check for logical ordering of your points: Are your points logical, or are they meandering all over the place? Consider how each section connects with the next and reorganize if need be.
• Delete all fluff: Delete any point, sentence, paragraph, and section that does not support the central theme of your article. Or, reframe them so that their relevance is apparent.
• Break long blocks of text: Long paragraphs are difficult to read. Short paragraphs are easier to scan and read. So break long blocks of text with bullet points, images, and videos. This increases the chances of your article being read from start to finish.
• Optimize your content for SEO: If you plan to distribute your article by ranking on search engines ensure it adheres to on page SEO best practices.

Step 5: Editing, Proofreading & Fact Checking

You’re now at the final stage of the editing and writing process.

Your goal is to ensure:

• Sentences flow well.
• Typos and punctuation are fixed.
• Sentences are simple, and you use fewer words.
• Facts are attributed and presented correctly.

So go through your revised draft with a fine-toothed comb and ask the following questions:

Is every statement easy to understand?

“My aim in constructing sentences is to make the sentence utterly easy to understand… I have failed dreadfully if you have to read a sentence twice to figure out what I meant,”says Ken Follet, a New York Times bestselling author. That should be your aim, too.

Is every idea expressed in a few words?

Don’t write “in the near future” instead of “soon.” “On a daily basis” instead of “daily.” “As a result of” instead of “Because.” “Despite the fact that” instead of “although.” Bottom line: don’t use five words where one or two words would do. Fewer words can drive the same or more impact.

Does the narrative flow smoothly?

The best articles read like poetry. Every sentence has a meaning and connects well with the next. One way to create the same effect in your article is to use transition words and phrases generously.

Are claims backed with relevant sources?

Don’t make a claim and expect people to take your word for it. Show proof by linking to your source. When you express strong opinions, share why. State the basis for your stance.

Are there any typos?

Look for errors like “YouTube” being spelled as “Youtube.” “I’m” as “Am.” etc. Your word processor or spellchecker might not catch every error. So read thoroughly. Tools like Grammarly are insanely helpful here.

Are all facts linked correctly?

Can you confirm that the hyperlink to a Harvard Business Review article doesn’t lead to the trailer of Marvel’s next blockbuster you’re hoping to watch in the summer? Check.

Can you replace passive voice with active voice?

It’s okay to use passive voice when the doer of the action is irrelevant to your discourse. Otherwise, write in an active voice. It’s punchier and more direct.

Write Excellent Articles & Generate Your Desired Outcome

Since I learned how to write excellent articles, I have had many repeat clients. I have also consistently made more income than when working on a freelancing platform.

These wins also prove that customers get value from their articles. Whether you run a business or are a marketer in a small to large-scale enterprise, recognize that creating excellent articles pays off. They can drive leads and produce revenue for your business.

Don’t get annoyed by the look-alike content you see on search engines. Instead, use them as a motivation to create better articles that’ll certainly produce results. When you focus on the outcome of creating quality articles for your website, you’ll write better content that leads to new business opportunities.

If executing this is challenging because you don’t have time, ensure you work with experts who can write articles that turn your audience into customers.

Using CoSchedule Marketing Suite To Write Kickass Articles

CoSchedule Marketing Suite is a project management system for agile marketing teams. The platform serves as a centralized repository, increasing visibility among all marketing operations to easily prioritize, plan, and manage work.
Using Marketing Suite, writing an article has never been easier. In 7 simple steps, here’s how:

1. Choose An Idea From Backlog

Marketing Suite Idea Bin is a designated space to store content marketing ideas. As you brainstorm new ideas, use Idea Bin to store, prioritize, and flesh out future articles.

When you’re ready to schedule a new article, either:

• Drag the project to a specific date on the calendar
• Click into the project and select a schedule date

2. Or Create A New Project

To add a new Project to your Marketing Calendar off the bat, simply click Create in the right hand corner.

From there, fill out a Project card to break down the details. Add the project name, project type (Article or Blog Post), publish date, color label, and tags.

3. Add A Task Checklist

Once a project has been created, add a task checklist to outline responsibilities and streamline team handoffs. The tasks included should support and help complete a larger, strategic goal.

For each individual task, assign a team member and deadline to ensure a smooth workflow. Save tasks as a reusable template, and apply the workflow checklist on future projects to save time.

Marketing Suite additionally offers default task templates for articles, blog posts, newsletters, email marketing, and podcasts.

After creating a Project, select a premade template, and watch tasks auto-populate. Edit the existing tasks by deleting, adding, or tweaking the to-dos to make them work for you.

4. Optimize Your Headline

Use CoSchedule Marketing Suite’s Headline Studio integration to draft, analyze, and improve headline copy to maximize click-through rates and grab reader attention.

5. Schedule Your Article

Finally! Whenever you are ready to schedule a finished article, click Status and choose Scheduled.

6. Promote Via Social Media

Promote your newly published article by using a Social Campaign.

Social Campaigns are a simple way to create and publish multiple social messages, across different platforms over a specific period of time.

When an article goes live, social messages from the campaign will automatically be set to publish, streamlining the social process.

Additionally, use in conjunction Social Templates to draft these messages in seconds.

7. Rest Easy Knowing CoSchedule Marketing Suite Has It From Here

Once a project status has been manually updated to Scheduled, the article is ready for publish. If using the WordPress integration, CoSchedule will automatically publish the article to WordPress for you on the day & time you’ve set on the project.

If plans change, simply drag and drop any project to a new date. All connected tasks and social messages will reschedule to coincide with it.

You’re in the right place.

Writing an awesome email is similar to writing a newsletter—you must structure your message, use effective language, and proofread for perfection.

But there are a few exclusive nuances to email that differentiate between sloppy, unprofessional messages that end up in the trash and well-written, effective emails that stand out in a crowded inbox.

In this guide, we’ll share a step-by-step rundown to help elevate your email game by addressing these pointers and other best practices.

Let’s get started.

[table of contents]

[content_upgrade_shortcode]

Step 1: Create An Email Outline

Your email might be your only opportunity to connect with a recipient, so it’s essential to:

• Know what you want to communicate through the email
• Align the email copy with the core message— optimize each word for the recipient to take the intended action

The easiest way to implement these pointers is to define the email’s purpose and create an outline of what it should look like.

Recommended: Marketing Email Generator

Know The Recipient

Who are you writing the email to? Is it for business reasons? Have you contacted this person before?

If you’re writing a cold email, using formal language and tone makes sense, as it’s the first time you’re contacting the recipient. Likewise, a casual or friendly tone is appropriate when emailing a friend or someone you’ve been doing business with for a while.

Then think about the action you want the recipient to take.

Do you want to share information, invite them to an event, set up a meeting, or do something else? Defining the intention behind your email will help you set the right tone and phrase your email correctly.

Define Your Email Topic

For your email to cut through all the clutter in the recipient’s inbox, you need to master the art of concise, compelling copy. And to do this, you must first determine your email’s purpose and goal—and stick to it.

You may be tempted to include all the great things about your company. Think: your brand story, testimonials from customers, and the experts working at your company.

But your email is not the place for all this information. Perhaps when you write a blog or your company’s ‘About Us’ page, but definitely not an email.

For example, if you want the recipient to set up a meeting, don’t give them your bio, an introduction about your company, and everything it has achieved. Instead, briefly introduce yourself and tell them about the pain point your product can solve for them.

You want to provide value without distracting the recipient.

Create A Mental Email Outline

Once you’ve defined your email’s audience and purpose, consider the following questions to create a mental picture of what your email should look like:

• Do you have the correct email address of the recipient?
• What language or trigger points can get the recipient to act on the email’s intended goal (for instance, sign up for a webinar or schedule a meeting)?
• Is there a need to include attachments, such as case studies, Google Docs, or business reports?
• Should you add calls-to-actions (CTAs) or links? If yes, how many?
• What are the most important points your email must cover?
• Would a screenshot or image help clarify these points further?

You should have a brief outline to guide your writing process at this stage. You can also convert the outline into a template or use it as a checklist, so you don’t have to start from scratch whenever writing an email.

Step 2: Write An Attention-Grabbing Email Subject Line

Being the first thing your recipient sees, your email subject line determines whether they‘ll open your email. Research suggests that 47% of email recipients open an email, and 69% report an email as spam—all based solely on the subject line.

This line should be compelling enough for the recipient to open the email. But, at the same time, it should preview the message you want to communicate.

If your subject line fails to intrigue, your email will end up in the trash. It won’t matter how well-written the actual copy is.

Here are a few best practices to keep in mind:

Email Subject Line Best Practices

• Keep it short, within nine words and 60 characters. Otherwise, your subject line may get trimmed in the inbox.

Example: Stop wasting time on {Prospect Pain Point}

• Highlight the purpose of your email in one sentence. Offer a specific hook that communicates your product’s benefits or calls their attention to specific deals.

Example: Request your presence at {Event}

• Be specific. Avoid vague language or fluff.

Example: Last Chance! {Offer or Discount} on {Product Name} this summer

• Add a personalized touch. Consider using the recipient’s name to catch their attention.

Example: {Mutual Contact Name} recommended I reach out to you, {Recipient Name}

• Use power words to trigger action. Even better if you start with an action verb.

Example: Learn the better way to {Task Name}

Pro Tip: Try CoSchedule’s Subject Line Tester for free to help create an eye-catching subject line.

Step 3: Greet The Email Recipient

Your email should begin with a suitable greeting, which includes the salutation and the opening sentence.

Let’s quickly discuss how to get each element right.

Set The Right Tone With The Salutation

Your choice of salutation should depend on the situation.

For example, if you’re writing a formal email, a “Dear {Recipient Name}” is a better way to start your message. But if you’re sending an email to someone you know, using “Hi {Recipient Name}” or “Hello {Recipient Name}” is preferable.

Don’t misspell someone’s name or address them with the wrong salutation. This is particularly important when sending cold emails, as it determines the possibility of you getting a response.

Business coach Barbara Pachter recommends scrapping informal expressions like ‘Hey’ and ‘Yo’ in her book, The Essentials of Business Etiquette.

Here are some salutation “don’ts” to avoid:

• Overly formal salutations, such as ‘Sir’ and ‘Madam’
• Using generic and unexciting openers like ‘To Whom It May Concern’
• Time-specific greetings like ‘Good Morning’ or ‘Good Night’ (if you don’t know the recipient’s timezone)
• Indicating the recipient’s job title (Dear job_title)
• Ending with exclamation points (‘Hi Nathan!!!’)

Come Up With An Attention-Grabbing Opener

At this point, you only have seven seconds to hold your recipient’s attention and compel them to continue reading the rest of your email. A strong opening line is your ticket to grabbing the reader’s attention, like this one:

If you’re introducing yourself, open with something that will pique the recipient’s interest. Here’s an email template that mentions how a partnership opportunity can benefit the recipient:

The following are some standard best practices to apply when writing email introductions:

• Limit your introduction to 1-2 sentences.
• Avoid adding irrelevant information or unnecessary detail.
• Consider hyperlinking your LinkedIn profile or website to provide more context about yourself.
• If you’ve met or spoken to the recipient earlier, briefly mention the instance to find a common touchpoint.

Avoid sending a general introduction that makes the reader feel they‘re one of the many recipients. Instead, do a little research (think: looking up social media profiles or referencing a mutual colleague) to add a personalized touch.

Skip this part if you’re emailing someone who already knows you.

In this case, start with a pleasantry (for instance, “Hope you’re having a great day!) and get straight to the body.

Step 4: Write The Body Of Your Email

This is the juicy bit of your email where you’ll share the full message.Your reader probably doesn’t have the time to read a lengthy email. If you don’t want them to skim through your message—or skip it completely—keep it brief and to the point.

Use the BLUF strategy to help them understand your email’s intent, which involves writing your Bottom Line Up Front to quickly answer the recipient’s 5Ws: Who, What, Where, When, and Why.

Here’s a great example:

Check out more tips on how to write emails here.

You should also optimize your email for readability and scannability.

Here are a few tips for writing an excellent email body:

• Keep your sentences and paragraphs short
• Add bullet points when possible
• Avoid technical jargon and fluff
• Use standard formatting; use bold, italics, and underlining to highlight important points
• Don’t assume the reader’s knowledge; always break down your text and provide the necessary information

Admittedly, the body section of your email can be tricky. The best way to write this is to:

1. Consider the main takeaway from your email
2. Think about the particular CTA you want the recipient to take
3. Write the email, ensuring every line you add helps you with the above two pointers

Step 5: End With An Impactful CTA & Sign-Off

How you end your email is just as important as how you begin.

Don’t leave the recipient hanging after communicating your message. Summarize everything in one to two sentences, and add a CTA, giving them the next steps. Examples include:

• Would it be possible to schedule a meeting over coffee to discuss this further?
• Please reply to this email with the requested information.
• Please book a slot in my Calendly to schedule a call regarding this.

Ensure your CTA is persuasive and highlights the importance of the action. Do this right, and you’ll have a high chance of getting a positive response.

Then add a closing remark (for instance, ‘Looking forward to working with you’ or ‘Waiting for your positive response, to take it further’) and a sign-off depending on your email’s purpose and relationship with the recipient. Think:

• Best regards
• Warm regards
• Regards
• Sincerely
• Best
• Kind regards
• Thanks
• Cheers
• Respectfully
• Talk soon

Don’t overlook your closing statements. The wrong sign-off can make a bad impression, making you look unprofessional or overfamiliar.

Step 6: Proofread & Edit Your Email

Imagine spending hours crafting the perfect email, only to be ignored because it’s filled with grammatical errors. That’s why it’s super essential to proofread your email.

But simply proofreading isn’t enough; you should also ensure your email copy sounds human.

Here are some email copywriting tips to make your email copy punchy and actionable:

Avoid Repetition

Read your sentences out aloud. Are you repeating words within the same paragraph, perhaps even in a sentence?

While this isn’t the worst writing offense, it can make your copy sound repetitive and make the reader tune out.

Keep an eye out for the following most commonly repeated words:

• Only
• Information
• Also
• Just
• Item
• Order
• Even
• Request
• Report
• Always

You can also run your copy by a colleague before hitting ‘Send.’ A second pair of eyes will help you remove overused or repeated words you may have missed.

Use The Oxford Comma

When thinking about how to write an email, people generally hail or shun the Oxford comma. You may also have some strong opinions about it, but it’s usually a good idea to use them in emails to avoid confusion or miscommunication.

Trim Overly Long Sentences

We often get emails that are just these enormous blocks of text. But how often have you simply skimmed through it instead of reading the whole thing?

Swap hard-to-follow or unclear sentences with concise sentences that focus on the matter at hand to get a satisfactory response—or any response. End it with a CTA so the reader knows what to do next, and be clear you’re open to questions and follow-ups if needed.

Check The Formatting & Font

How will you react if you get the following email:

Probably delete it and assume it’s a scam, right?

There’s nothing wrong with adding images or GIFs to your email, but there is a way to do it, so it doesn’t look distracting or jarring. For instance, using several different font sizes and colors can feel overwhelming. Your message will likely get lost with a host of elements fighting for your reader’s attention.

As a rule, sticking to one font style, size, and color is better.

Sound Human

Your recipient is an actual person, so use language that sounds like something you would say. Writing sentences that sound like a robot typed them or are straight out of the Victorian era isn’t going to do you any favors in getting a good response from the reader.

Instead, give your email a more natural effect. Write as if the person you’re speaking to is sitting beside you in a coffee shop. For instance, instead of saying, “Greetings, I hope the weather is fair where you live,“ say something like, “Hi, hope all’s well at your end.”

Step 7: Use A Professional Email Signature

Although not necessary, a professional email signature helps establish your authenticity. It also gives the recipient more context about your role and company. Take this one, for example:

It includes the individual’s:

• Headshot
• Full name
• Role
• Company
• Website
• Contact information
• Links to social media profiles

You have everything you need to get in touch, all in one place.

Smart, right?

Moreover, most email services and platforms like Gmail and Outlook let you attach automatic email signatures to every email, so you don’t have to add them for each email manually.

Of course, you can always make changes based on your email’s purpose for a better response and include additional information catered to your goal.

Achieve a professional brand consistency with CoSchedue’s Email Signature Generator!

Source

8. Your Turn To Send An Excellent Email

Writing good emails is an art that takes time, but if you follow our process diligently, you’ll see a drastic improvement in your open and click-through rates. Here’s to you getting better responses!

Create A Reusable Process For Executing Email Marketing with CoSchedule Marketing Calendar

1. Create A New Email Project On Your Calendar

Create a new project in the marketing calendar by clicking create in the right-hand corner of the home page.

From there you can choose what type of project this is.

Pro Tip: If your project relates to a particular product, line, team, or goal, you can provide additional context using tags and descriptions.

2. Draft An Engaging Subject Line To Increase Opens

First impressions matter and you only get one shot with your email subject line. Ensure a strong email subject line that is sure to generate a high click through rate.

If you choose an Email Marketing project type, CoSchedule’s Email Subject Line Tester automatically pops up to analyze your subject line.

Start testing out potential subject lines and receive instant feedback supported by data. You’ll learn how to produce click-worthy subject lines that drive conversation and engage your audience.

3. Assign Tasks To Your Team

Delegate tasks to your team to confirm every step of the process is understood by everyone involved.

• Write Email Subject Line
• Draft Body of Email
• Review
• Edit Body
• Write sign-off
• Final Proofread
• Send Email

Choose and assign a due date for your project, ensuring everything will be completed on time to send the email.

4. Breathe Easy Knowing You Sent An Impactful Email

Once all of your tasks are completed, you can schedule your email to send.

If you are using one of Marketing Calendar’s email integrations, you can do this from the Calendar. If you are using another email marketing software, add a task to schedule or send email to your project.

Give yourself a pat on the back and send off your finalized email!

You can Save As A Template, saving you time and effort in the long run. All of the tasks, sub-tasks and content preserve so you’re rest assured that your next email has everything all in one place as a reusable template.

Whether you’re starting a new blog or you’re in the marketing trenches day in and day out, inspiration can be hard to come by.

Learning from other successful blog examples can help you create a content strategy of your own. That’s why this post will share actionable tips and takeaways to help you emulate and pull inspiration from others who have already found success.

This post is packed full of examples to get you inspired. But, what happens next when it comes time to implement each actionable takeaway?

That’s where these templates come in. Download the blog post bundle to get templates to help you organize, write, and manage your blog.

Recommended: Blog Post Idea Generator and Catchy Title Generator

[Table of Contents]

[content_upgrade_shortcode]

1. Shopify Blog

Shopify is one of the world’s leading e-commerce platforms thanks to its easy-to-use interface, high-converting themes, and excellent customer support. Their blog covers a broad range of topics related to business, marketing, and the Web.

https://www.shopify.com/blog landing page for all their blog content

What Makes the Shopify Blog Great?

The first thing that stands out is its variety of content. If you’re running an e-commerce business, there’s a lot you need to do marketing-wise, and it wisely avoids the trap of being too narrowly focused.

How to Emulate the Shopify Blog

• Figure out which topics resonate most with your audience.
• Consistently publish content on a variety of those topics.
• Get multiple voices writing on your blog.

2. Orbit Media Studios

Lots of marketing agencies invest in content that demonstrates their expertise and capabilities. Few do so, as well as Andy Crestodina and the team at Orbit Media Studios.

https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/ covers practical tips for content marketing, analytics, and web design.

What Makes the Orbit Media Studios Blog Great?

It isn’t easy to be both actionable and concise; however, this blog consistently achieves both of those goals. Their posts typically share practical how-to marketing advice in a way that’s easy to understand while also showing the reader how to implement it.

How to Emulate Orbit Media Studios

• If you tell someone to do something, show them how to get it done.
• Eliminate extraneous information.
• Try to stick to a reasonable word count.

3. Smart Passive Income

Smart Passive Income founder Pat Flynn is a blogging machine. He’s built an immensely profitable business, and he shares his advice willingly.

https://www.smartpassiveincome.com is Pat Flynns platform where he shares tips and tricks to grow your audience.

What Makes Smart Passive Income Great?

This blog is awesome because it’s full of advice that Pat has executed himself. He speaks from first-hand experience, and that’s just one thing that helps this blog stand out.

How to Emulate Smart Passive Income

The key here is to share tips around things you’ve actually tried. Taking this approach leads to unique and original posts that others can’t copy easily.

• Become an expert at something new.
• Share what you learn.
• Be generous with your expertise.

4. Ahrefs Blog

Ahrefs is one of the leading SEO tools to help blogs rank higher and get more traffic. SEO often seems like magic to newcomers, but fortunately, the Ahrefs Blog is here to demystify how it works.

https://ahrefs.com/blog/ covers many topics regarding their tool as well as best SEO practices.

What Makes the Ahrefs Blog Great?

The team at Ahrefs consistently covers the topics and problems SEO practitioners and marketers most often encounter and they show readers how to actually get things done.

How to Emulate the Ahrefs Blog

Dig deep into technical topics and make them easy to understand. Do that while making your advice actionable, and you’re on your way to creating a blog that readers will trust.

• Include step-by-step instructions.
• Listen to your audience.
• Engage with readers.

5. Matthew Woodward

Matthew Woodward started his blog back in 2012 and currently focuses on topics primarily related to SEO. With in-depth guides and case studies, Matthew compiles a ton of research into every post he writes.

https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/ is Matthew Woodward’s blog where he posts about SEO content.

What Makes Matthew Woodward’s Blog Great?

What separates Matthew’s blog from most other SEO blogs is that he publishes well-written case studies. It’s one thing to blog about the technical components of SEO, but it’s another thing to provide a step-by-step outline of how a particular brand achieved its goals.

How to Emulate Matthew Woodward’s Blog

Case studies take time and great documentation. Good organizational skills are key.

• Create case studies that document an entire process.
• Use lots of visuals/screenshots.
• Encourage dialog and respond to all comments.

6. CoSchedule Blog

Since its humble beginnings as a marketing blog & calendar in 2013, CoSchedule has grown into a marketing solution offering several products and thousands of free marketing resources. CoSchedule’s suite of products strives toward helping marketers plan, create, promote, and measure their content at every level.

https://coschedule.com/blog covers many marketing related topics to help marketers.

What Makes CoSchedule’s Blog Great?

Aside from the fact that it’s ours? :) The answer boils down to two words: actionable content. Each blog post must offer thorough, ready-to-implement advice.

How to Emulate the CoSchedule Blog

Your focus should always be actionability but round it out with a healthy serving of passion.

• Build trust in your audience by helping them achieve their goals.
• Feature how-to posts and repurpose podcasts or other media regularly.
• Vote for value and overdeliver in your content whenever you can.
• Try new ideas and formats.

7. Microsoft Story Labs

Microsoft’s business spans several different industries. From innovative PC hardware to their venerable productivity software and beyond, few companies have greater global reach or impact on how the world uses computers. Microsoft’s Story Labs blog covers all kinds of stories about their products as well as forward-thinking, innovative ideas.

https://news.microsoft.com/stories/ is a blog style page where Microsoft covers a variety of topics.

What Makes Microsoft Story Labs Great?

Microsoft’s blog topics certainly aren’t conventional, and they do a great job of thinking outside the box. Whether they’re discussing the United Nations partnering with students to build better public spaces using Minecraft, or a wallpaper company revolutionizing a “boring” product, they excel at publishing compelling content like what you’d find on a leading non-branded blog.

How to Emulate Microsoft Story Labs

This blog excels at exceptional storytelling, which requires rolling up your sleeves, doing some research, and really getting to know your interview subjects.

• Hone your inner journalist.
• Ask your sales team for ideas on exciting customers.
• Share those stories on your blog.

8. Think With Google

If you think the largest search engine in the world, Google, would know how to create great content, you’d be correct. They publish several different blogs, but for this post, look at Think With Google.

https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/ gives writers insight and ideas how to publish great content.

What Makes Think With Google Great?

What stands out here is the sheer variety of types of content available. You’ll find articles, videos, infographics, tools, research reports, and more on the home page.

How to Emulate Think With Google

• Create a variety of content formats.
• Make that content easily digestible.
• Keep it updated consistently.

9. Dell Blog

Dell, the well-known computer hardware company, is another excellent example of a brand thinking like a publisher when it comes to its blog.

https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/ covers a variety of tech news and information for their readers.

What Makes the Dell Blog Great?

It’s a simple detail, but this blog’s design and category selection look much like any other tech news site someone might choose to read. They share news, opinions, and reported features as you’d find on those types of sites.

How to Emulate the Dell Blog

The name of the game here is thinking like a publisher.

• Emulate news publishers instead of other brands.
• Hire enough content creation and management staff to do it right.
• Invest in good blog design.

10. Tech Savvy Mama

If you’re a parent in the 21st century, you know both the struggles and opportunities of technology and parenting. Tech Savvy Mama explores how to use technology as a parent in a fun, easy, and safe way.

https://techsavvymama.com/ covers different topics regarding parental safety with technology

What Makes Tech Savvy Mama’s Blog Great?

Tech Savvy Mama offers an unbiased opinion on topics that many parents in the digital age are concerned about. Providing valuable tips from someone readers can relate to is the name of the game here.

How to Emulate Tech Savvy Mama’s Blog

Writing about something you have prior experience in and something you’re passionate about, will be more enjoyable for you to write and for your audience to read.

• Discover and discuss the pain points of your target audience.
• Include helpful links and research throughout your articles.
• Be involved and passionate about what you’re writing about.

11. PlayStation Blog

With the gaming industry’s total revenue expected to reach $314.4 billion by 2026, it’s no wonder why Sony would want to make sure one of its flagship brands has a strong blog presence.

https://blog.us.playstation.com/ covers many topics in different media forms regarding video games, consoles, and latest tech news.

What Makes the PlayStation Blog Great?

One detail you could focus on here is the sheer variety of content types. There are news pieces and videos, to new podcast episodes, and beyond. There’s also a high level of production value. It’s well-written and on par with what one would expect from a professional blog.

How to Emulate the PlayStation Blog

Like the Dell example, this blog excels by taking a publisher-style mindset. However, it’s more directly branded (it is the PlayStation Blog, after all).

• Start small but build your way up.
• Hire professional content staff.
• Look at what news sites in your industry do, then emulate them.

12. Pliancy

In a world of content for the sake of content, Pliancy’s blog hones in on personal perspectives. The angle works well with their IT platform’s tagline of “people first”.

https://pliancy.com/blog has great blog posts regarding processes, experiences, and growth.

What Makes the Pliancy Blog Great?

Excellent storytelling, and bold, no-nonsense blog posts. All posts include valuable, real-life examples as takeaways.

How to Emulate the Pliancy Blog

Focus each of your blog posts on a Big Idea. Expand on that Big Idea through personal stories and real-world examples.

• • Feature blog posts that expand on your company mission in detail to help customers understand the philosophy and processes behind your work.

• Focus on personal perspectives and experiences as topics.
• Allow the personalities of your staff to shine through each post.

13. Twingate

Twingate is a blog about security, access control, IT compliance, and product development. If your company covers similarly complex and technical topics then they’re the blog to follow.

https://www.twingate.com/blog/ covers topics regarding IT, security, and more written from all levels of employment to gain different perspectives.

What Makes Twingate’s Blog Great?

Expertise and credibility. The blog is written by various levels of staff, who each also have their own personal brand that helps amplify their blog.

How to Emulate the Twingate Blog

• Mix product updates with coverage of technical how-tos and case studies.
• Build blog posts around other media, such as a podcast, a video or an interview.
• Keep informational posts highly technical. No fluff.

14. Musicians Friend: The HUB

Musicians Friend is an online musical instruments store that sells everything from guitars, drums, recording equipment, amps, and so much more. With such a large selection of products, it can be daunting to choose which product is right for you – that’s where The HUB comes in.

https://www.musiciansfriend.com/thehub covers buying guides, as well as information on products for potential customers.

What Makes The Hub Blog Great?

Musician’s Friend’s blog, The HUB, is a fantastic example of content marketing done right. Instead of forcing customers to go somewhere else to do product research, this blog is full of helpful buyer’s guides and informative articles.

How to Emulate The HUB

While e-commerce companies can benefit most directly from following this example, any website with product or service pages could employ a similar approach.

• Figure out which questions newcomers to your industry often ask.
• Create informative buying guides.
• Make that content easily accessible on product pages.

15. ModCloth

ModCloth’s mission is to reimagine women’s clothing by offering unique designs and a seamless online shopping experience. Buying clothes online can sometimes be a hassle, but the Modcloth Blog helps make things easier by sharing style tips, showing off new products, and more.

https://blog.modcloth.com/ creates content regarding styles and new trends for customers to read.

What Makes the ModCloth Blog Great?

Top-notch product photography is the name of the game here. On top of that, ModCloth does a great job at sharing behind-the-scenes content of photoshoots and “what’s in my shopping bag” articles where staff share their favorite pieces.

How to Emulate the ModCloth Blog

Even if you don’t have access to a professional photographer, you can start applying some of the principles that make this blog’s photography work so well.

• Invest in photography.
• Include real people in your product shots.
• Show people creative ideas for using your products.

16. Musician Tuts

Musician Tuts is a tutorial hub for all types of musicians. Whether you want to learn how to become a better guitarist, sing with more power, or are just looking for a list of popular Christmas songs to play, Musician Tuts has you covered.

https://musiciantuts.com/ covers topics for guitarists to explore.

Recommended: Song Title Generator

What Makes Musician Tuts Great?

Apart from its informational content, Musician Tuts also features creative blog ideas like expert roundup posts and joke collections. Many blog posts feature high-quality charts, audio files, and videos to help musicians better understand certain concepts.

How to Emulate Musician Tuts’ Blog

• Add accompanying media wherever possible to help get your point across.
• Use creative blog ideas to give your blog personality
• Create informative review guides.

17. Boing Boing

Boing Boing describes itself as “A Directory of Mostly Wonderful Things.” That gives you some idea of what you’ll find here: a wide variety of exciting stories loosely revolving around art, culture, technology, and beyond.

https://boingboing.net/ covers a variety of topics for their readers to browse.

What Makes Boing Boing Great?

Beyond exceptional writing, it excels at offering a diverse mix of stories that other sites and blogs don’t cover. It’s relevant and unique, which isn’t an easy balance to strike.

How to Emulate Boing Boing

• Curate stories you think your audience would find interesting.
• Cover a variety of topics.
• Develop a strong editorial voice.

18. Laughing Squid

Laughing Squid is a web hosting service whose blog takes an off-beat approach to content creation by writing about things like White Stripes cover videos or time-lapse videos of cable train rides.

https://laughingsquid.com/ covers a variety of topics using a unique approach to blogging.

What Makes the Laughing Squid Blog Great?

If those kinds of topics seem irrelevant at first, consider this: Laughing Squid is in the business of hosting websites. So, why not share the most interesting things they can find from around the web? It’s a smart content strategy that has made them a much better-known name than if they blogged about dry, technical topics instead.

How to Emulate the Laughing Squid Blog

This approach isn’t necessarily difficult to follow. It relies heavily on curating content and offering commentary. The challenge rests in consistently finding content worth sharing.

• Find an exciting intersection between your product, your industry, and what your audience enjoys.
• Get creative.
• Curate content.

19. Chris Brogan

Chris Brogan is a New York Times best-selling author who has written several marketing books and offers some great free resources on his blog. His articles take on a more conversational tone than other blogs, making them unique and stand out from the crowd.

https://chrisbrogan.com/# writes about controversial topics and utilizes short, unique content rather than long form content.

What Makes Chris Brogan’s Blog Great?

It’s well-written, and the posts are quick. Readers are given quality takeaways without setting aside an hour to read each one. Quality is more important than length.

How to Emulate Chris Brogan’s Blog

Though copying Brogan’s expertise may be challenging, there are some aspects of his blog that are easy to emulate.

• Make your blog’s focus clear.
• Offer free resources on your site.
• Blend opinion and practical advice.

20. Bad Red Head Media

Bad Red Head Media is here to help authors close gaps in their skill sets so they can learn how to write great books and understand how to market them, too.

http://badredheadmedia.com/blog/ helps writers write good books, as well as market them to the public.

What Makes Bad Red Head Media Great?

It has attitude and personality, but it isn’t condescending. Founder Rachel Thompson is here to be helpful, and she delivers in spades, with posts clearly explaining how to tackle all kinds of marketing tasks an author might encounter.

How to Emulate Bad Red Head Media

Be yourself and be committed to helping your audience. Here are a few ways to do just that:

• Let your personality shine through.
• Share helpful tips.
• Keep it clear and straightforward.

21. Full Focus – Michael Hyatt

Michael Hyatt has a lifetime of knowledge to share about leadership. And that’s exactly what he offers on his blog – Full Focus.

https://fullfocus.co/blog/ covers topics about leadership and he keeps his content short and concise.

What Makes the Full Focus Blog Great?

Beyond the quality of his guidance and advice, Hyatt keeps his content short and to the point in an easy-to-read list format.

How to Emulate Full Focus’s Blog

• Start by planning posts that share practical advice.
• Group them together by theme.
• Maintain a warm and helpful tone.

22. Ryan Robinson

If you’ve ever wanted to learn how to start a blog, Ryan Robinson does a great job at diving into how it’s done. Ryan creates some seriously impressive guides on starting a blogging business, freelancing, content marketing, and more.

https://www.ryrob.com/blog/ covers topics regarding blogging, freelancing, as well as content marketing to generate an income.

What Makes Ryan Robinson’s Blog Great?

Ryan is transparent with his readers about how he makes money through his blog, and his guides provide actionable, step-by-step advice on how to replicate his successes. His content doesn’t stray too far from the blogging and online business niche, so his audience knows what to expect from him.

How to Emulate Ryan Robinson’s Blog

• Be transparent with readers.
• Focus on one main niche and dominate it.
• Perform in-depth keyword research.

23. The Home Depot Blog

Being one of the largest home improvement supply companies in North America, Home Depot can offer actionable advice on how to use their supplies in your next home improvement project. And they’ve done just that with their blog, which focuses on DIY projects, how-to’s, remodeling ideas, and more.

https://www.homedepot.com/c/diy_projects_and_ideas covers DIY and ideas for those who are interested.

What Makes the Home Depot Blog Great?

The first thing that stands out is its quality and simple design. They offer useful videos and detailed articles that will help you complete a project and provide you with an easy way to purchase the exact products you need to get the job done.

How to Emulate the Home Depot Blog

One thing to focus on is making content people want and making it easy to sort and find.

• Make it easy to filter content by category or interest.
• Make content interactive.
• Make that content detailed and actionable.

24. Benjamin Moore Blog

Benjamin Moore is a leading supplier of paints, stains, and primers. With a product so focussed on aesthetics and design, it’s no wonder Benjamin Moore’s blog is focused on providing renovation examples to help inspire you.

https://www.benjaminmoore.com/en-us/project-ideas-inspiration talks about project ideas and inspiration for customers.

What Makes Benjamin Moore’s Blog Great?

Benjamin Moore makes it easy for non-designers to visualize what a room could look like if they use specific colors and accents. Their blog focuses on providing high-quality imagery and accompanying that imagery with the Benjamin Moore colors used.

How to Emulate Benjamin Moore’s Blog

If you’re into DIY or are writing an article about a project you completed, make it easy for your readers to purchase the exact products you used. Link out to each product within your post so that if your audience wants to replicate the process, they can do it with ease.

• Give readers ideas that will inspire them.
• Make it easy for your audience to replicate the process.
• High-quality imagery is critical.

25. Chris Loves Julia

People love seeing before and after renovations, and that’s exactly what Chris Loves Julia’s blog is all about. The duo is constantly renovating homes, updating designs, and bringing their readers along for the journey.

https://www.chrislovesjulia.com/ shares inspirations regarding remodels and designs for people to see.

What Makes Chris Loves Julia’s Blog Great?

The overall tone of voice and writing style used in the Chris Loves Julia blog is incredibly personal and makes you almost feel like you know them. What’s more, their blog updates are consistent and detailed, keeping readers coming back for the latest updates.

How to Emulate Chris Loves Julia’s Blog

It can be tough to consistently post content every day, especially if you have a small team. That being said, consistently publishing new, high-quality content will only improve your chances of having a successful blog.

• Consistency is key – post every day.
• Writing in a conversational tone to better connect with your audience.
• Take high-quality before and after pictures.

26. Copyblogger

Brian Clark and the team at Copyblogger have been writing one of the best blogs for copywriters for years.

What Makes Copyblogger Great?

One aspect that makes this blog one of the best is its clarity and focus on offering solid educational content. Any time you visit Copyblogger, you can rest assured you’ll leave with something useful you can apply to your work.

How to Emulate Copyblogger

• Don’t neglect beginners and non-experts.
• Get to the point.
• Help your audience be more productive.

27. Copyhackers Blog

Copyhackers pride themselves on offering copywriters high-quality products, tips, and tutorials on becoming a better copywriter. Whether in sales or marketing, the Copyhackers blog can most likely offer you some advice worth reading.

https://copyhackers.com/blog/ covers tips and tricks to better copywriting marketing.

What Makes Copyhackers’ Blog Great?

What immediately stands out when you get to the Copyhacker’s blog is they give you the option to define what you do and which skill you’re looking to improve. Filling out this information immediately provides you with hyper-focused content that you’re more likely to click on.

How to Emulate Copyhackers’ Blog

• Make it easy for your audience to find the content they’re interested in.
• Use gifs for humor.
• Create scroll-stopping blog titles.

28. Smashing Magazine Blog

Smashing Magazine is more than just you’re average blog; they do everything from hosting live events to selling books and having their own job board. The articles published on the Smashing Magazine blog are typically very in-depth and focused on web design, development, and performance.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/articles/ publishes articles about web design, development, and performance.

What Makes Smashing Magazine’s Blog Great?

The team at Smashing Magazine not only writes their own articles but also publishes articles from thought leaders and experts in the industry. Their publishing process is rigorous and detailed, which makes for top-notch content.

How to Emulate the Smashing Magazine Blog

Smashing Magazine has a strong reputation in the web performance and development space, so writers typically come to them, but you can also reach out to experts in the industry and ask if they would like to guest post for you.

• Reach out to experts in the industry to write for you.
• Provide actionable and detailed advice in every post.
• Focus on a broad niche and dive deep.

29. VistaCreate Blog

Marketers and designers are always busy. VistaCreate’s blog is dedicated to helping them stay on top of projects and trends with practical listicles.

https://create.vista.com/blog/ posts about different topics to keep users up to date on new trends.

What Makes VistaCreate’s Blog Great?

Their roundup “best of” articles are an excellent source of inspiration for what other creators are doing.

How to Emulate the VistaCreate Blog

Feature at least 5-10 season-specific articles per season (for example, 10 Best Christmas Campaigns, 12 Best Books on Branding Holiday Gift Guides, and more).

• Use mainly listicle-type blog posts.
• Follow and report on successful marketing projects done by others in the industry.
• Give away templates to help busy marketers.

30. Patagonia: The Cleanest Line

Patagonia is a mission-driven brand that sells men’s and women’s apparel, packs, bags, and more. They pledge 1% of sales to preserve the natural environment, and their blog, The Cleanest Line, documents stories that align with their mission.

https://www.patagonia.com/blog/ covers content regarding their mission and brand to draw in new customers

What Makes The Cleanest Line Great?

It doesn’t feel like a generic brand blog. Patagonia has gone to great lengths to produce top-notch content that doesn’t just catch people’s attention when they’re in shopping mode, but when they’re simply browsing the web.

How to Emulate the Patagonia Blog

• Share your mission.
• Source high-quality photography.
• Get well-respected writers on your blog.

31. Evernote

As one of the premier personal and organizational apps out there, it makes sense that Evernote’s blog would focus heavily on productivity and getting organized. That includes sharing use cases for their product and posts about organization and productivity in general.

https://evernote.com/blog/ posts regarding productivity and organization in the workplace.

What Makes the Evernote Blog Great?

This blog balances product-centric posts and content that connects with broader topics its audience would be interested in. If readers care about what your product does, they will probably be interested in other related topics.

How to Emulate the Evernote Blog

Bloggers and content marketers often wonder whether it’s okay to promote their own products in posts, and Evernote shows how to do it right.

• Show your audience how to use your product.
• Cover topics related to what your product helps people achieve.
• Think outside the box.

32. Spoon Fork Bacon

One blog to consider following in the food space is Spoon Fork Bacon. Its clean design, quality photos, and clear recipes stand out as a case study in food blogging done right.

http://www.spoonforkbacon.com/ posts photos and recipes for readers to view and follow to generate traffic.

What Makes Spoon Fork Bacon Great?

Aside from having a humorous name, it’s well-written and full of personality. The images are tantalizing and tasty looking, which engage food-lovers to want to read more about the dish.

How to Emulate Spoon Fork Bacon

• The best food blogs are all about high-quality photography.
• Avoid cluttering recipes with unnecessary information or ads (something that can make commercial cooking sites challenging to navigate).
• Get a writing partner or someone to help create content and manage your blog.

33. Redfin Blog

Redfin is a full-service real estate brokerage where you can do everything from buying, selling, and renting a property. Buying or selling a home can be a scary process for many folks, so Redfin’s blog offers valuable tips and advice for buyers and sellers.

https://www.redfin.com/blog/ posts about all things home buying, real estate, and buyer advice.

What Makes Redfin’s Blog Great?

Redfin’s blog has a collection of insightful articles answering questions that you may have not even thought of. Things like How to Avoid a Delayed Closing or What You Need to Know About Mortgage Underwriting.

How to Emulate Redfin’s Blog

Go above and beyond to answer questions your audience might not have known they had. If you’re able to help your readers avoid certain mistakes, they’ll thank you for it and put more of their trust in you.

• Answer questions your readers didn’t know they had.
• Provide clear step-by-step instructions.
• Categorize your posts so you can easily sort them.

34. Etsy Blog

Etsy is an e-commerce marketplace focused on handmade goods. Everything from custom-made kitchen mitts to laser-cut jewelry can be found on Etsy, and their blog does a great job at featuring these artisan creators.

https://www.etsy.com/blog posts about DIY projects or arts and crafts for readers to see.

What Makes Etsy’s Blog Great?

Etsy’s blog offers a balance of DIY ideas and shopping guides and a Featured Shops section that highlights creators on their platform. This gives their creators a chance to tell their story and provides Etsy blog readers a chance to learn more about each creator’s products and mission.

How to Emulate Etsy’s Blog

If you own a shop that sells products manufactured by other suppliers, you can interview those suppliers to give your buyers a better idea of where your products come from and how they’re made.

• Highlight stories from your product or service’s users.
• Create gift list posts for different occasions.
• Get crafty and show the step-by-step process of how to complete DIY projects.

CoSchedule Marketing Calendar is the perfect platform for managing blog content creation, promotion, and workflows. But, how exactly does having editorial calendar software help achieve these goals?

Create your free marketing calendar now!

See All Your Blog Posts On One Calendar

With Marketing Calendar, you can see your entire publishing schedule and automate posting days and times, all in one place.

Integrate Social Media Channels & Email Service Providers To Automate Promotion

Plus, you can connect your social networks and email platform (including Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, Campaign Monitor, and Constant Contact) to keep all your blog post promotion organized.

Manage Workflows & Team Communication

If you have a team of content creators, you can easily manage workflows with reusable project checklists called Task Templates and communicate with Discussion Threads.

What does this all mean? It means Marketing Calendar is your ultimate tool for keeping your blog organized so that you can publish and promote more consistently, with less effort.

How Do You Write A Blog?

Although there are multiple steps to writing a blog post that is well-researched and thought out, there are some basic elements that all successful blogs share. These elements include things like coming up with a relevant keyword, doing plenty of research, adding visual content, and optimizing for search engines.

What Are 4 Common Types Of Blogs?

Four common types of blogs include:

1. Business: Typically written by owners or employees of a company and focus on topics related to the product or service that the company sells.
2. Personal: Written by individuals and can be about any topic, from family life to politics to travel.
3. Industry/Niche/Vertical: Focused on a specific industry, niche, or vertical market.
4. Entertainment: Covers topics like celebrities, movies, music, and TV.

What Are 5 Common Blog Platforms?

There are a variety of platforms to choose from when deciding how to manage and publish your blog content. However, the 5 most common blog platforms include WordPress, Wix, Medium, Blogger, and Squarespace.

What Does A Blog Look Like?

Blogs can take on many shapes, and the type of post you’re writing will likely influence the post template you use. Whether you’re writing how-to articles, numbered lists, survey posts, or expert roundup blogs, try to follow a template that makes it easier for the reader to digest the information.

Recommended: Hire Mia’s Free Blog Post Generator

This piece was originally published November 22, 2018. It was reoptimized and republished June 4, 2021, December 1, 2021, July 31, 2022, October 21, 2022, February 27, 2023, and March 1, 2024. Ben Sailer, Leah DeKrey, Nathan Ellering, and Owen Piehl contributed to this piece.

Successful entrepreneur and technology investor, Anthony Pompliano, tweeted why entrepreneurs must learn how to write a business plan.

Here’s what he said:

View on Twitter.

Did he invest in the business? You bet!

The takeaway from Anthony’s tweet is clear. A standout business plan lets investors see your idea’s viability, which could open the floodgate of investment.

A solid business plan is crucial even if you’re bootstrapping your business. Ethan Mollick, Professor and author of The Unicorn’s Shadow, summarizes what you can expect by writing a business plan. In Ethan’s words, “A business plan increases your chance of success by 10-20%.”

Perhaps you’re aware of the benefits of a business plan. Yet, the mere thought of writing your business plan bores you to tears, and you’d rather watch paint dry!

That’s why you need a detailed guide that makes the business plan writing process stress-free. In this guide, I’ll walk you through a step-by-step process for writing a winning business plan.

[table of contents]

[content_upgrade_shortcode]

What Is A Business Plan?

It serves as a blueprint, guiding your actions through every stage of building your business.

I’ll delve into the details of how to write a business plan shortly. But first, let’s explore a few reasons for writing your business plan.

Recommended: Business Plan Generator

Why Is A Business Plan Crucial?

Over 50% of entrepreneurs start their businesses without a plan.

If you seek investment funding, this is a no-no. A business plan gives you a better chance of getting a ‘Yes’ from investors. Here are two reasons to have a business plan, even if you’re bootstrapping.

1. Business Planning Ensures Resource Optimization

A CB Insights report says, “Running out of cash is one of the top 12 reasons startups fail.” This means that a conservative use of funds is crucial to the survival of your business.

When you develop your business plan, you compel yourself to consider the various aspects of the business.

The result? You deploy resources efficiently and preempt mistakes that could cost you time, money, energy, and your business.

2. Business Planning Enables You To Plan For A Strong Startup Team

The quality of your startup team is vital to the success of your business.

View on Twitter.

Even if your idea is the best since sliced bread, you still need the best people working with you. Writing a business plan allows you to plan for an A+ team, which can boost your odds of success.

Bottom line: Building a business without a business plan is like navigating a ship without a map. You could go around in circles and spend your funds until the business grinds to a halt.

If you don’t want that, you need to know how to write your business plan to stay on track.

How To Write A Business Plan In 7 Simple Steps

Business plans ‌fall into two categories:

• A lean business plan:

Lean business plans are one-pagers or, at the most, two-page documents. These pages provide a high-level overview of your business focus, strategy, and goals.

• A traditional business plan:

Traditional business plans contain many pages, so they are usually more comprehensive. We’ll discuss how to write a traditional business plan in the seven steps below.

Step 1: Write An Interesting Executive Summary

Check out the full video here.

The executive summary is the introduction and one of the most important sections of your business plan. Interested business parties, like investors and lenders, may read just your executive summary. That’s because they are time-strapped and have many schedules on their plate.

An executive summary is like the headline of a newspaper article. If it doesn’t grab the reader’s attention, they lose interest and toss it aside.

Your executive summary should provide a high-level overview of your business concept. Like an elevator pitch — but with more detail — it conveys what your business does, who it’s for, why it’s different, and why it’ll be successful.

The purpose of your executive summary is to sell your business idea and its profit potential. Done right, it intrigues readers enough to thumb through the remaining pages.

Your executive summary should be under 2 pages and answer the following questions:

Pro Tip: Don’t write your executive summary until you’ve completed the rest of your plan. Since the executive summary gives an overview of your business plan, it’ll be easier to write after you complete other sections of your plan.

Step 2: Describe Your Company

Your company description is the second component of your business plan. This section shows who you are, the problems your business solves, your goals, and why you are different.

I’ll illustrate using Yellow Leaf Hammocks.

Check out the full Yellow Leaf Hammocks page.

• Who they are: makers of the “world’s most comfortable” hammocks
• Their goal: empower their weavers—craftswomen from Northern Thailand—to break the cycle of poverty
• Why they’re different: They achieve their goals through training and sustainable job creation.

Not only do they make some of the finest and highest-quality hammocks, but their entrepreneurial venture also has a social cause. Include this kind of detail in your company description.

Your company description should also include details about the management team. This is information investors want to see.

Patrick FitzGerald, Investor and Wharton Entrepreneurship lecturer, says he reviews up to 50 business plans monthly. Know the first page Patrick flips to? The team section. “I try to see who these people are. What are they made of?” he said in an Entrepreneurship Workshop session at The Wharton School. Specifically, he’s looking to see if founders have:

• An advisory board that makes up for any lack of experience you may have.
• Industry experience.

In summary, your company description should contain your:

• Business model.
• Business mission and vision.
• Business name, registered address, and contact information.
• Founding story — how you came about your idea and why you pursued it.
• Business structure — sole proprietorship, partnership, or limited liability company (LLC). Include the ownership stake of every party as well.
• Management team, including their professional background, unique skills, and expertise.
• Short-term goals (achievable within 12 months) and long-term goals (achievable within 5 years).

Step 3: Share Your Market Analysis

Is the size of your total addressable market big enough?

Use this section to discuss your target market, the results of your market research, and how you plan to grab a huge amount of market share.

Your market analysis should prove:

1. You’ve validated your idea.

It’s not enough to claim an understanding of your target customers and their needs. You must also provide Proof of Concept (POC), i.e., data-based evidence that your idea is workable. As American management consultant W. Edwards Deming said, “Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.” And it’s dangerous to base your business on opinions alone.

Often, many entrepreneurs skip this crucial step, remain blinded by their enthusiasm, and assume there’s a market for their product. This is incorrect. 35% of businesses die in infancy because there’s no market need for their product.

Strong and growing sales numbers are the most effective way to prove there is demand for your business. However, if you’ve yet to launch your business, you can test the feasibility of your idea with the lean start-up methodology.

2. You’ve analyzed your competitors and identified your competitive edge.

Have you thought hard about how you compare to your competitors? Expert-level understanding of your business environment is crucial to your success. To achieve this, conduct a thorough competitive analysis, do a SWOT analysis, and share your results.

The outcome of your analysis equips you to:

• Define your competitive advantages.
• Clarify your unique selling proposition (USP).
• Develop strategies that outperform competitors.
• Choose the best marketing approaches for your products/services.

Patrick Fitzgerald recommends focusing on 4 to 5 competitors. Otherwise, it becomes overwhelming.

Pro Tip: As the first (and probably the most important) investor in your business, avoid being blinded by enthusiasm. Objectively analyze these aspects of your business as thoroughly as an investor would.

Step 4: Describe Your Products Or Services

While your products and services may appear in multiple sections of the plan, it’s great to have a section that describes how they work.

For instance, if you have four physical products, it makes sense to describe all of them so that readers understand how they work and what makes them unique. If you have many products, pick a few and describe them. For tech products, share information about your product’s front and back end.

Always keep your explanations simple. Don’t assume readers have industry experience. Don’t make them work hard to understand your products and services.

Note that if your product is a commodity item, elaborate descriptions are unnecessary. But if you’re creating a new product, share insights about how you plan to protect your intellectual property with patents, trademarks, etc.

Step 5: Present Your Sales & Marketing Strategies

How will you spread the word about your business?

“If you build it, they will come” is a dangerous myth. The reality is this: businesses never live up to their sales potential without effective marketing efforts. That’s why you should invest time in building your marketing plan.

Recognize that your business needs repeat business to thrive, not one-time sales. Your marketing plan should include strategies both for acquiring and retaining customers.

Key information for this section includes:

• Impact and results of past marketing efforts
• Clear, realistic, and measurable sales targets
• Goals for future marketing efforts
• Deadlines for meeting set goals.
• Budget for all marketing activities.
• Marketing channels (e.g., word of mouth, social media, advertising, direct-to-consumer, retail stores, e-commerce, etc.)

Step 6: Share Your Financial Projections

Your financial projection helps investors and lenders know if your business will make a profit. It compares your operating costs with your projected sales and profit to see if your business will be profitable.

Keep in mind that a financial projection isn’t merely a prediction. It implies a commitment to achieving the targeted results.

Essential information to include in this section:

• Projected sales over the next 18- 36 months, including high, medium, and low sales estimates
• Total costs of producing goods, including marketing, promotion, commissions, administration, salaries, etc.
• Profit and loss projections
• Break-even analysis
• Projected cash flow

These projections are guesses, but they should be data-driven. Make estimates based on previous sales, experiences, market analysis, etc. If you haven’t launched your business, base your projections on industry averages.

It’s better to make conservative estimates and exceed them than to make over-optimistic projections. Unrealistic hockey stick profit projections could repel potential investors, but exceeding sales targets would strengthen their faith in your brand.

Take Jeff Bezos, for instance. He projected medium and high sales of $74 million and $114 million, respectively, for the year 2000. But according to Brad Stone’s book, The Everything Store, net sales in 2000 hit $1.64 billion. No wonder investors kept backing him, even when Amazon remained unprofitable for many years.

View the page here.

Step 7: Outline Your Operations & Management Plan

The operations and management plan describes how your business will operate, and it’s the concluding section of the business plan. It provides a high-level overview of your workflows, production processes, supply processes, administration, and so forth.

Elements of your operations and management plan include:

• Organizational structure, i.e., who is in charge of each aspect of the business
• Expense and capital requirements to support the organizational structure
• Facility, equipment, and supply requirements
• Initial personnel requirements

Keep in mind that you don’t have to share the full details of your operational processes. That would take too many pages. Just provide enough detail to make your reader know you’ve thought through the day-to-day operations necessary to run your business efficiently. Plus, be ready to answer questions they might have.

If you’re seeking investment capital, your business plan should include your funding request. State what you want to achieve with the amount you raise.

Some business plans also contain an “Appendix” section. This section is necessary if you’re seeking investment funding. Use it to provide supporting information that didn’t fit within the earlier sections. Patents, resumes of key employees, legal agreements, and so on can be included in your appendix.

Plan, Write, & Share Your Business Plan Using Marketing Calendar

CoSchedule’s Marketing Calendar allows you to schedule, manage, and track your marketing efforts in one place. With Marketing Calendar, you can coordinate, execute, and share your business plan, so everything goes smoothly from start to finish.

1. Create A  Project For Your Business Plan

Add a business plan project to your calendar on the day you intend to publish the post.

2. Schedule Your Business Plan Projects

Select the date that you want your business plan completed by to ensure tasks are scheduled before that date.

Add Tasks

Write a list of tasks to complete the business plan without missing any details.

Pro Tip: Write the subtasks in the description section of each task on Marketing Calendar. 

Attach Documents

Add additional documentation to your business plan project. From financial statement files to the first draft, access all the necessary documents in the project to keep everything stored in one place.

Additional Document Ideas

• Financial Statement Files
• Outline Document
• Draft Copy
• Images
• Graphic Data
• Additional Projects

Add Business Plan Details To The Project

Outline important business plan details in the Text Editor attachment to provide instructions or add needed information to set your team up for success.

From the names of stakeholders to company background, write information that is prevalent to the business plan for the whole team to access.

3. Delegate Tasks To Your Team

Make sure every task is completed on time by delegating duties to each team member. Add completion dates under each task to set deadlines.

4. Share Your Business Plan With Stakeholders

Click on the three-dot menu of the project to share any part of your business plan project with stakeholders.

CoSchedule’s Marketing Calendar allows you to share read-only views of project attachments. Distribute sharable links or PDF versions of documents to easily present your business plan to stakeholders.

Pro Tip: Share progress throughout the project with stakeholders by sharing the read-only links with stakeholders.

Ready To Write Your Business Plan?