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Most conversion rate optimization experts you’ll meet would agree: Copywriting first. Design second.

The idea is that copy (and the message you’re trying to convey through that copy) should dictate design – not the other way around. Now, this is in no way meant to underestimate the importance of design. Design can breathe life into the story the copy is telling, and done properly, great copy plus great design will always outperform great copy alone.

The point is, it’s not hard to find examples of “ugly” pages outperforming beautifully designed pages – and in those cases, it usually boils down to the copy.

Copy first. Design second.

We’ve been chatting about this a lot lately on HubSpot’s marketing optimization team. In the past, our marketing team has typically followed a design first, copy second order of operations when designing web pages. And it’s hard to blame us. We try to move fast and ship projects quickly, and the design before copy approach is definitely the quicker of the two, since copy can be written in tandem with the development of the design.

But when copywriting comes first, design can’t even begin until copy is complete. And because development can’t happen until design is done, this definitely extends the timeline of project execution. The problem is, this means you’re crafting copy under the limitations of a fully baked design, handicapping your ability to tell the story in the best way possible. 

Now I’ll admit: All this “copy before design” business always sounded great to me in theory, but conversion rate optimization experts also warn against the dangers of “best practices,” so it was really enlightening to find an example of this theory proven out on one of our very own web pages. 

The Experiment

In addition to our main free trial landing page, we also have a bunch of targeted, tool-specific free trial landing pages that the marketing team uses for more segmented campaigns. Below you’ll find an example of one (image B), which is targeted to specifically promote HubSpot’s Blogging tool. And here are the two compared to each other …

A. Main Free Trial Landing Page (Above the Fold)

B. Tool-Specific Free Trial Landing Page (Above the Fold)

As you can see, these tool-specific landing pages were built using an older template, and when we redesigned our main free trial landing page to look the way it currently does, its tool-specific counterparts remained in the former design. Seeing this as low-hanging fruit from a conversion perspective, I converted three of our most trafficked tool-specific free trial landing pages into the newer template. To be sure the newer design was still in fact the better converting design, I A/B tested each page against its pre-existing design. 

The Initial Results 

When I first analyzed the results of these three tests, the variation (i.e., the design using the newer template) only won for two of the three pages. Naturally, I tried to understand why. When I took a closer look at the third one (the free trial landing page for our Keywords tool), I noticed a difference. Can you spot it?

Older Template (Control)

Newer Template (Variant)

Okay … obviously there are a few differences here, considering the design is completely different. But the one that stuck out to me immediately was that the positioning of the header/subheader copy in the control was very different than that of the variant. 

Control Header + Subheader Copy:

Find Out Which Keywords You (And Your Competitors) Rank For

Instantly access SEO data with HubSpot’s Keywords tool by starting a 30-day free trial.

Variant Header + Subheader Copy:

Try HubSpot’s Keywords Tool Free for 30 Days

Get found in search for the keywords that matter.

The positioning in the control was primarily focused on the value of the Keywords tool, specifically emphasizing the competitive intelligence the tool provides, whereas the positioning in the variant was focused on clarifying what the offer was itself (i.e., a free, 30-day trial). And while I had made sure the variant still mentioned the competitive intelligence value of the Keywords tool, I had buried it lower down on the page … below the fold. 

Isolating Variables

The problem with this test was that I wasn’t isolating the variable I was trying to prove. In this case, I wanted to prove that the new design for the page performed better than the existing design, yet I was manipulating more than one variable: design and copy. So after I had my “duh” moment, I decided to tweak the positioning in the header copy of the variant to match the control, and let the test run for a few more weeks. This way I’d be doing a better job of isolating design as the variable I was testing.

Here’s what the header and subheader copy in the control and variant looked like after I tweaked the variant. Note that I made no changes to the copy in the control …

Control Header + Subheader Copy:

Find Out Which Keywords You (And Your Competitors) Rank For

Instantly access SEO data with HubSpot’s Keywords tool by starting a 30-day free trial.

Variant Header + Subheader Copy:

Find Out Which Keywords You & Your Competitors Rank For

Get SEO data instantly with a free trial of HubSpot’s Keywords tool.

And here’s how it looked in each template variation … 

Older Template

Newer Template

Final Results 

A few weeks after making those tweaks, I re-evaluated my test. Bingo! 

The variant was the new winner with 99.07% confidence and a 20% increase in conversion over the control.

Aside from the fact that this was (ultimately) a successful test, what I love is that it proves how influential copy can be. The only reason the control originally outperformed the variation was because people preferred the copy in the control — even though the design of the variant ultimately performed better. 

So there you have it: Don’t underestimate copywriting in favor of design. In fact, copywriting can be even more influential than design when it comes to conversion rate optimization.

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Content is used as a valuable marketing tool across all industries. From social media content to long-form evergreen content, marketers constantly write to build awareness and nurture  relationships. While the goal of content marketing is clear, many companies forget to track what type of content is actually working.

Even powerhouse Microsoft fell into that habit. At one point the Microsoft.com website had 10 million pages of content but 3 million of them had never been visited. By removing unnecessary and irrelevant content, Microsoft made its customers much happier and learned what type of content works in attracting consumers. And all of that happened by conducting a content audit.

5 Reasons for a Content Audit

There are a variety of reasons that a company might need a content audit. Here are some of the problems that plague companies because of the lack of a content audit.

Lots of Traffic Coming in But Not Many Qualified Leads

Here’s a scary stat: one-third of B2B marketers don’t track where their leads come from. This clearly needs to be corrected in order to figure out what marketing channels work and which should be eliminated. Once your company takes a look at lead generation, you may find that while more and more traffic comes in, none if it is really relevant to your brand.

This is oftentimes a content problem. The content could be attracting the wrong target and therefore no one converts. 56% of survey respondents said they were doing content marketing without a plan. When qualified leads are not coming in, maybe the content was not written with a clear buyer persona; therefore, the content does not address a specific need or pain point of that audience.

Unclear Value Proposition = Unclear Content

Only 7% of leadership teams can explain a clear, common value proposition, but 85% of CEOs say their employees can state the company’s value proposition. This dichotomy leads to very unclear content. If writers do not have a clear picture of the company’s value, then the content will reflect this and appear confusing to the reader. A value proposition helps build relevance for target buyer personas, helping to improve engagement, shares, conversions, and trust.  

Blog Doesn’t Play a Role in Sales

B2B marketers that use blogs receive 67% more leads than those who do not. Many companies, however, do not use the blog as part of the sales process, which means no leads or opportunities come through because of the blog. 

This can be because the sales and content marketing teams are not aligned. The blog should help push leads down the sales funnel, helping to produce qualified leads. A company’s blog can also help provide sales teams useful nurturing content as they help prospects navigate the awareness, consideration, and decision stages of the buying process.

Leads or Sales Goals Aren’t Met

If leads or sales metrics are falling behind, surprisingly this could be because the content strategy is not tied to the sales strategy. Before revising the sales process, performing a content audit could uncover why certain goals aren’t met. Content must aid the sales process, as 41% of businesses say curated content increased the number and/or quality of sales-ready leads.

Blog Subscribers Don’t Read Your Content

If people that actively subscribed to your blog content are not reading it, then a content audit is desperately needed. By finding out why these people subscribed, you can start to get your content back on track. Perhaps with different team members writing, blog content began to drift from its original purpose, making it no longer useful for the audience.

What To Do Next

Before launching into a full scale content audit, take a step back and ask some key questions about the content being created.

Is the Content Value-Driven? Does the content align with the company’s value proposition? What are the key value points that relate to your customer and does the content reflect this?
Is the Content Persona-Driven? Does your content align to the needs, interests, and opportunities associated with target buyer personas or an ideal buyer profile?
Is the Content Results-Driven? Does your content assist in the conversion of leads and sales opportunities? Does the marketing team align efforts with results? Which content assists in conversions of leads and which content does not? Using Hubspot, identify which content directly influencers sales qualified leads.
Have You Invested in a Content Strategy? Have time and resources been fully invested to craft the best content strategy? Has this content team continually updated and improve and build upon top-performing content?
Are the Sales and Marketing Teams Aligned? Content can play a huge role in sales, so identify the weak points in the sales process and align marketing strategies along those points. Have you found opportunities to support, educate, inspire, and guide buyers through the sales funnel? Content can help with each step, so marketing and sales teams should meet on a consistent basis.

You Probably Need a Content Audit

If you answered no to any of these questions, then it is time for a content audit. A content audit can help improve sales, make your customers happier, and get rid of unnecessary pages that can be bogging down your website, so if you have fallen into any of the traps listed above, it’s time to audit the content on your website.

View more content marketing stats and trends.  

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Product titles are among the most important factors influencing the performance of your Google Shopping campaigns. Contributor Andreas Reiffen shares data on how to optimize them.

The post Google Shopping feed optimization: Speak your customers’ language and write more compelling product titles appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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There’s no better time than the end of the year to take a good look at your brand’s performance. In fact, that’s where year-end reviews come from. But rather than just focus on the performance and efficiency of your employees and operations, content marketers should also be extending their evaluations to the strategies and blogs they use.

If you’re like me, the bulk of your day-to-day tasks are likely centered around the content you produce. Whatever processes you have for researching, brain storming, and ultimately drafting for your content marketing strategy, they all will likely benefit from some review. It’s typical for those day-to-day tasks to suffer as the year progresses, and taking the time to go over how you do what you do and how effective it really is can set you up for greater success in 2017. Here’s how content marketers can do a year-end review for their content marketing strategy.

Start with an audit.

The best way to start your content marketing review is to gather all your content so you can take a good look at it. I keep track of my published articles in a spreadsheet as well as my Google analytics account. By rounding up all of the blogs, guest posts, social media campaigns, and other noteworthy content production efforts you made in 2016, you can see a complete picture of what your strategy looked like.

Look at the numbers.

One of the most important things you can do not just yearly but on a regular basis is see what the numbers have to say. If you’re a blogger, taking a good look at how each different pieces of content perform is a crucial part of understanding how you’re most effective. What does Google analytics show you about the content you produce? Which pieces got the most traffic, and why? Your main objective should be to judge content performance by the data, and use what you learn to strategize more effectively in 2017.

Determine what does and does not work.

Sometimes you get comfortable doing the same kind of content over and over and fail to realize that it’s not resonating with your audience. In reviewing your content marketing strategy, be mindful of what simply doesn’t work. Are your listicles falling flat? Are certain topics getting more traffic than others? Try and identify common themes in your most successful and most unsuccessful content, and use what’s working to plan future pieces.

Make a plan for 2017.

There’s no point in doing a review of your content marketing strategy if you aren’t going to use the insights you’ve gained to plan for a better year. Looking at your content marketing strategy with a critical eye will show you exactly what you need to focus on in 2017. Even consulting a similar content marketer or someone you work with can help you find the most impactful ways to reach people, and you can tailor your new year of content to better reach your audience.

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Publishers are asking questions about the effectiveness of Google’s AMP carousel. Columnist Barb Palser analyzed 235 million AMP search impressions to find answers.

The post Is Google’s AMP carousel working? (Or, SEO insights from Kanye West) appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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Expanded text ads, the removal of the right rail in SERPs, and many other changes dominated the PPC world this past year. Read on to see Search Engine Land’s most popular paid search columns of 2016.

The post SEM’s legit: Our top paid search columns of 2016 appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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Checking your brands’ common misspellings, abbreviations, and misused hashtags from users can lead to be customer service and brand sentiment gains!

The post How to Capitalize on Social Media User Mistakes by @wonderwall7 appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

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There’s no denying it: Blogging for your business works. According to our 2016 State of Inbound report, B2B marketers who blog receive 67% more leads than those who don’t, and marketers who have prioritized blogging are 13X more likely to enjoy positive ROI.

Blogging is a crucial part of inbound marketing because it allows you to quickly disseminate helpful information to your followers and new site visitors, which, in turn, helps build credibility, SEO juice, and helps you become more of a thought leader in your industry. Best of all, blogging is super cost-effective, because the only thing you need to spend is time.

But despite all of the advantages that focused blogging can net businesses, some marketers balk at the time commitment required. They’re not wrong — launching and maintaining a blog isn’t a one-day task. In fact, you’ll need plenty of planning, resources, and good old-fashioned effort to gain adequate ROI.

That’s why HubSpot and General Assembly have teamed up to create the new 10-week planner, How to Start a Successful Blog in 2017. It’s got tips on:

How to identify your target persona and anticipate what they want to read about
Building a bank of evergreen content ideas to keep your audience engaged year-round
How to design your blog to delight and engage your visitors
Using SEO and promotion to attract and scale traffic
Which metrics to analyze to measure the success of your launch
And more!

Click here to download How to Start a Successful Blog in 2017

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When it comes to devising solutions to challenging problems, a room full of bright minds working towards a common goal is almost always more effective than working alone.

Under the belief that the composition of a group influences the quality of its work, Google has spent years hunting for the key to what makes teams truly great. The tech giant is known for tapping its prodigious brainpower to solve complex problems with creative solutions.

Whether it’s revolutionizing search, email, or exploring the possibilities of driverless cars, Google provides a welcome example of a company focused on maximizing the potential of collaboration.

Project Aristotle

Over the past five years, Google has been engaged in an extensive undertaking to engineer the most productive groups possible. This endeavor, referred to as Project Aristotle, involved years of extensive observations of how employees at Google collaborate in group settings, according to The New York Times.

Project Aristotle’s findings suggest that many of the factors we’d expect to influence the outcome of a project actually didn’t actually have a significant impact on whether or not the group was successful.

Having a shared versus designated leadership structure, including employees from diverse employment backgrounds, and whether or not group members socialized outside of work did not necessarily determine a group’s chances of success.

Overall, there was one central trend which appeared in almost every successful group: feelings of psychological safety.

Psychological safety, according to Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, is the “shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking,” and “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up.”

In the majority of successful groups Google studied, participants identified feeling comfortable sharing ideas and asking questions. These feelings of psychological safety were not unique to any type of group or leadership dynamic. As Charles Duhigg wrote in the New York Times, the most productive teams listened to — and were respectful of — the ideas, feelings, beliefs and suggestions of their peers.

Early Education as a Model

The corporate model of psychological safety is not all that different than the one you had in grade school. When students are comfortable enough to share their ideas freely and don’t feel afraid of being rejected, they are able to learn better and take interpersonal risks.

While businesses and elementary schools are certainly not universally comparable environments, the importance of ideological and interpersonal safety is universally paramount.

To make a space safe for intellectual exploration, agencies must make concerted efforts to foster an open atmosphere of acceptance. As discussed in a 2014 TED Talk by Harvard Business School professor and author Dr. Amy C. Edmondson, individuals are often very worried about appearing incompetent or ignorant, and thus are more likely to keep their questions and ideas to themselves.

This not only stifles an individual’s creative potential, it also limits the potential for innovation in collaborative group settings. Imagine trying to learn new skills or ways of working in an environment where it’s intimidating to admit what you don’t know, much less share ideas that challenge established norms.

In competitive agency environments built on creative critique, often only a few leaders make decisions on ideas, clearly limiting the potential voice and contribution of team members.

With participation from more team members comes more ideas — and quite possibly a better product. Expanding critique and other opportunities requires that employees feel safe to speak up and participate within groups.

Applying Psychological Safety at Agencies

Maintaining an open and safe dialogue often goes against the grain of both corporate culture and human nature, but the companies that will thrive in the coming years will do so through their collective creativity and ability to innovate, rather than relying on the opinions of a few individuals.

Almost paradoxically, to survive in the ever-increasing competitive environment of today’s digital economy, agencies need to create intellectual safe havens that are more akin to your third grade classroom than any scene in AMC’s Mad Men.

Sweeping organizational culture shifts will not occur overnight, but change can start tomorrow. Here are five steps to start fostering a safe, productive workplace:

1) Stop the unhealthy practice of responding to new ideas with unproductive negativity.

You do not have to love every idea your peers put forward, but demeaning the idea and its creator is unnecessary, counterproductive and sometimes downright hurtful.

Research and personal experience tell us that sometimes we don’t voice our opinions because we fear embarrassment, looking dumb or feeling intellectually inadequate.

2) Always celebrate good ideas.

This is the counter approach to the previously mentioned unproductive behavior. The merit of this step applies for both teams and individuals. But seriously, who doesn’t appreciate being complimented for their hard work?

3) Acknowledge that the entire team effort goes into good work.

Great ideas, regardless of size, often come about because of the genius and hard work of at least a handful of people. So, when celebrating new ideas and innovative work, recognize the whole team, not just the manager or creative with the highest title.

4) Get those in power on board with psychological safety.

While change does not always have to come from the top, the behavior that managers, directors and executives model directly impacts and influences the actions of those below them. Therefore, change is only sustainable with a commitment from those in power.

5) Break down organizational silos to promote collaboration, communication and progress.

This is not to say everyone must work equally on all projects, but rather that teams should consider themselves multidisciplinary so employees of varying titles feel comfortable contributing. Organizations with healthy interpersonal relationships are more likely to have uninhibited idea sharing, increased collaboration and a better end result.

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Posted by Web_Perfectionist

The GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) format was originally developed in 1987. Debuted by Steve Wilhite of Compuserve, GIFs improved on the black-and-white images in use during that time by allowing the use of 256 colors while maintaining a compressed format that could still be loaded by those utilizing slow modems. Furthermore, web developers and designers could create animations via timed delays. And to this day, little has changed regarding GIFs.

Due to its simplicity, the widespread support for this format, and the ease with which it can be used to stream video clips, the GIF format is the oldest file format still commonly used today. This frame animation feature of GIFs ensures that the format remains popular, despite the rise of JPEG and PNG images.

In spite of their popularity and ubiquitousness on the Internet (especially with regards to animated GIFs), GIFs are not the most performant of image options. If you are using GIFs on your sites, it’s important that you take care to optimize your GIFs so that they do not create too much overhead.

This article will cover ways to optimize your GIFs, both static and animated, and will offer an excellent alternative you can use to eliminate the page bloat resulting from use of GIFs as animation.

Why should you optimize your GIFs?

Performance matters when it comes to designing your web pages, and GIFs are not the most performant of image options. While they are excellent for capturing your user’s attention and are universally liked for providing short bursts of information in an entertaining way, GIFs were not designed for animation (despite them being commonly used for such). As such, usage of GIFs leads to heavy page weights and poor user experiences resulting from slow page load speeds.

How to improve the performance of your site while using GIFs

In this section, we’ll cover several ways you can improve the performance of your site with regards to using GIFs. We’ll first dig into ways to handle static GIFs, and we’ll end by discussing ways to minimize the overhead resulting from animated GIFs.

There are two methods for compressing images:

One of the primary methods for optimizing GIFs is to compress them. There are two methods of compression that are commonly used:

Lossy compression: Lossy compression removes some of the data from the original file, resulting in an image with a reduced file size. However, every time you save the file after compression, the quality of the graphic degrades somewhat, which can result in a fuzzy, pixelated image over time.
Lossless compression: Lossless compression preserves all of the data from the original file, which means that the compressed file can be uncompressed to gain the original file. While your file size remains larger than if you had used lossy compression, your image’s quality does not degrade over time.

Later on in this post, we’ll cover the impact of both types of optimization on GIFs.

Improve the performance of sites that are using static GIFs by converting to PNG.

The easiest way to improve the performance of your site is to render your image using the PNG format instead of the GIF format. While the two formats are very similar in terms of being good choices for displaying simple graphics, PNG files have the advantage of being able to compress to a size 5–25% smaller than the equivalent GIF file. GIFs were originally created to use a lossless compression technique called the Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) algorithm, which was defined in the 1970s. However, modern compression techniques are much more performant than LZW, and you can take advantage of this by using formats that utilize these techniques, such as PNGs.

Such file format conversions are pretty easy to do, and there are an abundance of software options you can choose from, including free web-based utilities such as the ones from Pic.io and Convertio.

Improve the performance of sites that are using animated GIFs one of two ways:

Animated GIFs, while extremely popular, can be huge files that require lengthy load times. For example, a GIF that is just a few seconds long can be a few megabytes in size. To improve the performance of your site, use one of the following techniques:

Lossy optimization
Converting your animated GIF to a HTML5 video

Lossy optimization on animated GIFs

Because the vast majority of data comprising animated GIFs is graphical data, and because lossless optimizations cannot modify graphical data, you have only one viable option when it comes to optimizing an animated GIF beyond the bare minimum: lossy optimization techniques.

Lossy optimizations work because the human eye does not do a very good job at distinguishing between subtle changes in color. For example, an image might contain thousands of shades of one color, with one pixel showing as only slightly different from the ones next to it. Because your eye won’t be able to differentiate between the two shades, the image file can easily be manipulated: One of the colors replaces the other, making the file smaller.

Because animated GIFs are essentially a series of individual GIFs, you can utilize these techniques to decrease the size of your animated file. By making each individual file smaller, your overall file is smaller as well. One way you can do this is by utilizing a simple software suite that can automatically perform such compressions (such as a modified version of gifsicle).

Converting animated GIFs to HTML5 videos

While you can minimize the size of an animated GIF, you may still end up with a file that is larger than it needs to be. GIFs were never intended to store video, and what is now considered animation is really the result of an attempt to reduce overhead on the storage and transmission of multiple images that share identical metadata. Today, however, we have another option that could potentially make your GIFs up to 95% smaller: converting your animated GIFs to HTML5 video.

HTML5 video is a catch-all term for a modern web browser’s ability to play video content using the <video> tag without needing to use external plugins. When this feature was first released in 2009, there was a lot of debate over how such videos would be stored and how they would be encoded. Today, though, the accepted standard is an H.264-encoded video stored in an MP4 container file (which, for simplicity’s sake, we’ll refer to as an MP4 video from here on out). In addition to looking a lot better due to its being designed to stream video, MP4 files are much smaller as well:

Over 90% of modern web browsers support MP4 videos.

There are many ways to convert your animated GIF to MP4, such as the popular open-source command-line tool ffmpeg and the web-based utility Cloud Convert. Using the latter, you can see the file size savings possible by making the conversion.

Here’s the original animated GIF:

Here is the MP4 video that’s created from the GIF:

Sadly, your browser doesn’t support the video tag. This is a smooth MP4 video of the above GIF, which features Oaken from Disney’s Frozen.

Looking at the sizes of the files, we see that the original was 100 KB. By converting the GIF to MP4, we end up with a file that is just 23 KB, which is 75% smaller:

Conclusion

GIFs are the oldest file format still commonly used today due to their simplicity, near-universal support, and ability to be used as animation. Despite these positive features, GIFs tend to be large files, resulting in page bloat that can negatively impact the performance of your webpages and lead to poor user experiences. As such, you should consider serious optimization of static GIFs, moving away from animated GIFs, and implementing video clips using more modern techniques such as HTML5/MP4 videos. And for additional in-depth information on implementing these changes, download Rigor’s free ebook, The Book of GIF: A Comprehensive Guide to Optimizing GIFs.

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