Monthly Archives: December 2022

For a while now, you’ve been spearheading your organization’s content marketing efforts. Your team’s performance has convinced management to adopt the content marketing strategies you’ve suggested.

Now, your boss wants you to write and present a content marketing plan, but you’ve never done something like that before. You don’t even know where to start.

Fortunately, we’ve curated the best content marketing plans to help you write a concrete plan that’s rooted in data and produces results. But first, we’ll discuss what a marketing plan is and how some of the best marketing plans include strategies that serve their respective businesses.

The purpose of a marketing plan is to write down strategies in an organized manner. This will help keep you on track and measure the success of your campaigns.

Writing a marketing plan will help you think of each campaign’s mission, buyer personas, budget, tactics, and deliverables. With all of this information in one place, you’ll have an easier time staying on track with a campaign. You’ll also discover what works and what doesn’t. Thus, measuring the success of your strategy.

Featured Resource: Free Marketing Plan Template

Looking to develop a marketing plan for your business? Click here to download HubSpot’s free Marketing Plan Template to get started.

Keep in mind that there’s a difference between a marketing plan and a marketing strategy.

Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Plan

A marketing strategy describes how a business will accomplish a particular goal or mission. This includes which campaigns, content, channels, and marketing software they’ll use to execute that mission and track its success.

For example, while a greater plan or department might handle social media marketing, you might consider your work on Facebook as an individual marketing strategy.

A marketing plan contains one or more marketing strategies. It is the framework from which all of your marketing strategies are created and helps you connect each strategy back to a larger marketing operation and business goal.

For example, your company is launching a new software product, and it wants customers to sign up. This calls for the marketing department to develop a marketing plan that’ll help introduce this product to the industry and drive the desired signups.

The department decides to launch a blog dedicated to this industry, a new YouTube video series to establish expertise, and an account on Twitter to join the conversation around this subject. All of this serves to attract an audience and convert this audience into software users.

To summarize, the business’s marketing plan is dedicated to introducing a new software product to the marketplace and driving signups to that product. The business will execute that plan with three marketing strategies: a new industry blog, a YouTube video series, and a Twitter account.

Of course, the business might consider these three things one giant marketing strategy, each with its specific content strategies. How granular you want your marketing plan to get is up to you. Nonetheless, every marketing plan goes through a particular set of steps in its creation. Learn what they are below.

1. State your business’s mission.

Your first step in writing a marketing plan is to state your mission. Although this mission is specific to your marketing department, it should serve your business’s main mission statement. Be specific, but not too specific. You have plenty of space left in this marketing plan to elaborate on how you’ll acquire new customers and accomplish this mission.

For example, if your business’s mission is “to make booking travel a delightful experience,” your marketing mission might be “to attract an audience of travelers, educate them on the tourism industry, and convert them into users of our bookings platform.”

2. Determine the KPIs for this mission.

Every good marketing plan describes how the department will track its mission’s progress. To do so, you’ll need to determine your key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs are individual metrics that measure the various elements of a marketing campaign. These units help you establish short-term goals within your mission and communicate your progress to business leaders.

Let’s take our example of a marketing mission from the above step. If part of our mission is “to attract an audience of travelers,” we might track website visits using organic page views. In this case, “organic page views” is one KPI, and we can see our number of page views grow over time.

These KPIs will come into the conversation again in step 4.

3. Identify your buyer personas.

A buyer persona is a description of who you want to attract. This can include age, sex, location, family size, and job title. Each buyer persona should directly reflect your business’s current and potential customers. Therefore, all business leaders must agree on your buyer personas.

You can develop buyer personas for free right here.

4. Describe your content initiatives and strategies.

Here’s where you’ll include the main points of your marketing and content strategy. Because there is a laundry list of content types and channels available to you today, you must choose wisely and explain how you’ll use your content and channels in this section of your marketing plan.

A content strategy should stipulate:

Which types of content you’ll create. These can include blog posts, YouTube videos, infographics, and ebooks.
How much of it you’ll create. You can describe content volume in daily, weekly, monthly, or even quarterly intervals. It all depends on your workflow and the short-term goals you set for your content.
The goals (and KPIs) you’ll use to track each type. KPIs can include organic traffic, social media traffic, email traffic, and referral traffic. Your goals should also include which pages you want to drive that traffic to, such as product pages, blog pages, or landing pages.
The channels on which you’ll distribute this content. Popular channels at your disposal include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram.
Any paid advertising that will take place on these channels.

5. Clearly define your plan’s omissions.

A marketing plan explains the marketing team’s focus. It also explains what the marketing team will not focus on.

If there are other aspects of your business that you aren’t serving in this particular plan, include them in this section. These omissions help to justify your mission, buyer personas, KPIs, and content. You can’t please everyone in a single marketing campaign, and if your team isn’t on the hook for something, you need to make it known.

6. Define your marketing budget.

Your content strategy might leverage many free channels and platforms, but there are several hidden expenses a marketing team needs to account for.

Whether it’s freelance fees, sponsorships, or a new full-time marketing hire, use these costs to develop a marketing budget and outline each expense in this section of your marketing plan.

7. Identify your competition.

Part of marketing is knowing whom you’re marketing against. Research the key players in your industry and consider profiling each one.

Keep in mind not every competitor will pose the same challenges to your business. For example, while one competitor might be ranking highly on search engines for keywords you want your website to rank for, another competitor might have a heavy footprint on a social network where you plan to launch an account.

8. Outline your plan’s contributors and their responsibilities.

With your marketing plan fully fleshed out, it’s time to explain who’s doing what. You don’t have to delve too deeply into your employees’ day-to-day projects, but it should be known which teams and team leaders are in charge of specific content types, channels, KPIs, and more.

Now that you know why you need to build an effective marketing plan, it is time to put on the work. Starting a plan from scratch can be overwhelming if you haven’t done it before. That’s why there are many helpful resources that can support your first steps. We’ll share some of the best guides and templates that can help you build effective results-driven plans for your marketing strategies.

Ready to make your own marketing plan? Get started using this free template.

Types of Marketing Plans

Depending on the company you work with, you might want to leverage various marketing plans. We compiled different samples to suit your needs:

1. Quarterly or Annual Marketing Plans

These plans highlight the strategies or campaigns you’ll take on in a certain period.

Forbes published a marketing plan template that has amassed almost 4 million views. To help you sculpt a marketing roadmap with true vision, their template will teach you how to fill out the 15 key sections of a marketing plan, which are:

Executive Summary
Target Customers
Unique Selling Proposition
Pricing & Positioning Strategy
Distribution Plan
Your Offers
Marketing Materials
Promotions Strategy
Online Marketing Strategy
Conversion Strategy
Joint Ventures & Partnerships
Referral Strategy
Strategy for Increasing Transaction Prices
Retention Strategy
Financial Projections

If you’re truly lost on where to start with a marketing plan, this guide can help you define your target audience, figure out how to reach them, and ensure that audience becomes loyal customers.

2. Social Media Marketing Plan

This type of plan highlights the channels, tactics, and campaigns you intend to accomplish specifically on social media. A specific subtype is a paid marketing plan, which highlights paid strategies, such as native advertising, PPC, or paid social media promotions.

Shane Snow’s Marketing Plan for His Book Dream Team is a great example of a social media marketing plan

A successful book launch is a prime example of data-driven content and social marketing. Using data to optimize your social strategy spreads more awareness for your book, gets more people to subscribe to your content, converts more subscribers into buyers, and encourages more buyers to recommend your book to their friends.

When Shane Snow started promoting his new book, “Dream Team,” he knew he had to leverage a data-driven content strategy framework. So, he chose his favorite one: the content strategy waterfall. The content strategy waterfall is defined by Economic Times as a model used to create a system with a linear and sequential approach. To get a better idea of what this means, take a look at the diagram below:

Snow wrote a blog post about how the waterfall’s content strategy helped him launch his new book successfully. After reading it, you can use his tactics to inform your own marketing plan. More specifically, you’ll learn how he:

Applied his business objectives to decide which marketing metrics to track.
Used his ultimate business goal of earning $200,000 of sales or 10,000 purchases to estimate the conversion rate of each stage of his funnel.
Created buyer personas to determine which channels his audience would prefer to consume his content.
Used his average post view on each of his marketing channels to estimate how much content he had to create and how often he had to post on social media.
Calculated how much earned and paid media could cut down the amount of content he had to create and post.
Designed his process and workflow, built his team, and assigned members to tasks.
Analyzed content performance metrics to refine his overall content strategy.

You can use Snow’s marketing plan to cultivate a better content strategy plan, know your audience better, and think outside the box regarding content promotion and distribution.

3. Content Marketing Plan

This plan could highlight different strategies, tactics, and campaigns in which you’ll use content to promote your business or product.

HubSpot’s Comprehensive Guide for Content Marketing Strategy is a strong example of a content marketing plan

At HubSpot, we’ve built our marketing team from two business school graduates working from a coffee table to a powerhouse of hundreds of employees. Along the way, we’ve learned countless lessons that shaped our current content marketing strategy. So, we decided to illustrate our insights in a blog post to teach marketers how to develop a successful content marketing strategy, regardless of their team’s size.

In this comprehensive guide for modern marketers, you’ll learn:

What exactly content marketing is.
Why your business needs a content marketing strategy.
Who should lead your content marketing efforts?
How to structure your content marketing team based on your company’s size.
How to hire the right people for each role on your team.
What marketing tools and technology you’ll need to succeed.
What type of content your team should create, and which employees should be responsible for creating them.
The importance of distributing your content through search engines, social media, email, and paid ads.
And finally, the recommended metrics each of your teams should measure and report to optimize your content marketing program.

4. New Product Launch Marketing Plan

This will be a roadmap for the strategies and tactics you’ll implement to promote a new product. And if you’re searching for an example, look no further than Chief Outsiders’ Go-To-Market Plan for a New Product

When you’re looking for a marketing plan for a new product, the Chief Outsiders template is a great place to start. Marketing plans for a new product will be more specific because they target one product versus its entire marketing strategy.

After reading this plan, you’ll learn how to:

Validate a product
Write strategic objectives
Identify your market
Compile a competitive landscape
Create a value proposition for a new product
Consider sales and service in your marketing plan

5. Growth Marketing Plan

Growth marketing plans leverage experimentation and data to drive results, like we see in Venture Harbour’s Growth Marketing Plan Template

Venture Harbour’s growth marketing plan is a data-driven and experiment-led alternative to the more traditional marketing plan. Their template contains five steps intended for refinement with every test-measure-learn cycle. The five steps are:

Goal
Projection
Experiments
Roadmap
Insights

This is a great option if you want to experiment with different platforms and campaigns.

1. Visit Oxnard

This marketing plan by Visit Oxnard, a convention and visitors bureau, is packed with all the information one needs in a marketing plan: target markets, key performance indicators, selling points, personas, marketing tactics by channel, and much more.

It also articulates the organization’s strategic plans for the upcoming fiscal year, especially as it grapples with the aftereffects of the pandemic. Lastly, it has impeccable visual appeal, with color-coded sections and strong branding elements.

2. Safe Haven Family Shelter

This marketing plan by a non-profit organization is an excellent example to follow if your plan will be presented to internal stakeholders at all levels of your organization. It includes SMART marketing goals, deadlines, action steps, long-term objectives, target audiences, core marketing messages, and metrics. The plan is detailed, yet scannable. By the end of it, one can walk away with a strong understanding of the organization’s strategic direction for their upcoming marketing efforts.

3. Wright County Economic Development

Wright County Economic Development’s plan drew our attention because of its simplicity, making it good inspiration for those who’d like to outline their plan in broad strokes without frills or filler.

It includes key information such as marketing partners, goals, initiatives, and costs. The sections are easy to scan and contain plenty of information for those who’d like to dig into the details. Most importantly, it includes a detailed breakdown of projected costs per marketing initiative — which is critical information to include for upper-level managers and other stakeholders.

4. The Cultural Council of Palm Beach County

This marketing plan presentation by a cultural council is a great example of how to effectively leverage data in your plan, address audiences who are new to the industry, and provide extensive detail into specific marketing strategies. For instance, an entire slide is dedicated to the county’s cultural tourism trends, and at the beginning of the presentation, the organization explains what an arts and culture agency is in the first place.

That’s a critical piece of information to include for those who might not know. If you’re addressing audiences outside your industry, consider defining terms at the beginning, like this organization did.

5. Cabarrus County Convention & Visitors Bureau

Carrabus County’s convention and visitors bureau takes a slightly different approach with its marketing plan, formatting it like a magazine for stakeholders to flip through. It offers information on the county’s target audience, channels, goals, KPIs, and public relations strategies and initiatives. We specially love that the plan includes contact information for the bureau’s staff members, so that it’s easy for stakeholders to contact the appropriate person for a specific query.

6. Visit Billings

Visit Billing’s comprehensive marketing plan is similar to Carrabus County’s in that it follows a magazine format. With sections for each planned strategy, it offers a wealth of information and depth for internal stakeholders and potential investors. We specially love its content strategy section, where it details the organization’s prior efforts and current objectives for each content platform.

At the end, it includes strategic goals and budgets — a good move to imitate if your primary audience would not need this information highlighted at the forefront.

Sample Marketing Plan

Let’s create a sample plan together, step-by-step.

1. Create an overview or primary objective.

Our business mission is to provide [service, product, solution] to help [audience] reach their [financial, educational, business related] goals without compromising their [your audience’s valuable asset: free time, mental health, budget, etc.]. We want to improve our social media presence while nurturing our relationships with collaborators and clients.

2. Determine the KPIs for this mission.

For example, if you wanted to focus on social media growth, your KPIs might look like this.

We want to achieve a minimum of [followers] with an engagement rate of [X] on [social media platform].

The goal is to achieve an increase of [Y] on recurring clients and new meaningful connections outside the platform by the end of the year.

3. Identify your buyer personas.

Use the following categories to create a target audience for your campaign.

Age:

Gender:

Profession:

Background:

Interests:

Values:

Goals:

Pain points:

Social media platforms that they use:

Streaming platforms that they prefer:

For more useful strategies, consider creating a buyer persona in our Make My Persona tool.

4. Describe your content initiatives and strategies.

Our content pillars will be: [X, Y, Z].

Content pillars should be based on topics your audience needs to know. If your ideal clients are female entrepreneurs, then your content pillars can be: marketing, being a woman in business, remote working, and productivity hacks for entrepreneurs.

Then, determine your omissions.

This marketing plan won’t be focusing on the following areas of improvement: [A, B, C].

5. Define your marketing budget.

Our marketing strategy will use a total of [Y] monthly. This will include anything from freelance collaborations to advertising.

6. Identify your competitors.

Use the following questions to clearly indicate who your competitors are:

Which platforms do they use the most?
How does their branding differentiate?
How do they talk to their audiences?
What valuable assets do customers talk about? And if they are receiving any negative feedback, what is it about?

7. Outline your plan’s contributors and their responsibilities.

Create responsible parties for each portion of the plan.

Marketing will manage the content plan, implementation, and community interaction to reach the KPIs.

Social media manager: [hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations]

Content strategist: [hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations]

Community manager: [hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations]

Sales will follow the line of the marketing work while creating and implementing an outreach strategy.

Sales strategists: [hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations]

Sales executives: [hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations]

Customer Service will nurture clients’ relationships to ensure that they have what they want. [Hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations].

Project Managers will track the progress and team communication during the project. [Hours per week dedicated to the project, responsibilities, team communication requirements, expectations].

Get started on your marketing plan.

These marketing plans serve as initial resources to get your content marketing plan started. But, to truly deliver what your audience wants and needs, you’ll likely need to test some different ideas out, measure their success, and then refine your goals as you go.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in April 2019, but was updated for comprehensiveness.

Creating a marketing strategy is essential to effectively nurture your customers, improve the bottom line at your business, and increase the ROI of your efforts.

A marketing strategy is especially critical if you want to leverage the highest-ROI trends for 2023: short video, influencer marketing, and branded social media. To get powerful results, you must carefully weave both emerging trends and proven strategies into your plan.

Let’s dive into the critical components of a complete marketing strategy in 2023, followed by some examples for inspiration.

A marketing strategy will:

Align your team to specific goals.
Help you tie your efforts to business objectives.
Allow you to identify and test what resonates with your target audience.
Empower you to capitalize on emerging trends.

The last one is especially important for this upcoming year. Keeping up with marketing trends is important for your strategy, but could be a full-time job.

Why? Because in one year alone, we’ve seen a major shift to short-form video content; the rise and fall of new platforms (looking at you, Meta); and the continuing impact of the global pandemic. In short, what worked for your marketing strategy in the past might not fly today.

To succeed in the fast-paced marketing world — and maintain a sense of relevance with your audience — it’s vital to stay ahead of the curve.

To help ease some of that uncertainty, we’ve going to show you step-by-step how to create a marketing strategy that leaves no stone unturned. But first, let’s go over the individual components that make up a strong marketing strategy.

1. Marketing Mix

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The marketing mix, also known as the 4 Ps of marketing, is the preliminary document you must create to understand what you will be marketing, where you’ll be marketing it, and how you’ll be marketing it. The following P’s make up this framework:

Product: What are you selling?
Price: What is the price?
Place: Where will you be selling the product?
Promotion: Where will you be promoting the product?

You can then extrapolate this information into a full-fledged marketing plan for each promotional channel. It’s important to lay out the information in broad strokes so that you understand the overall direction of your marketing strategy.

2. Marketing Objectives

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You can set your marketing objectives in conjunction with your 4 Ps, or right after. Either way, you should outline your marketing goals before building upon your strategy. Why? Because your goals will inform other components of the plan, including the budget and content creation process.

With every objective, you should aim to be as specific as possible. Try to create SMART marketing goals divided by channel or promotional tactic, and don’t forget that you can always come back and revise your goals as your priorities change.

3. Marketing Budget

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A marketing budget is an essential element of your strategy. Without allotting funds to hiring the right talent, using the right software, advertising on the right channels, and creating the right content, your marketing strategy won’t have a powerful impact. To get a high return on investment, you must first invest.

Remember that you can always start small — hyper-focusing your budget on one or two efforts — and build upon them once you generate an ROI.

4. Competitive Analysis

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Knowing your competition is key when creating a marketing strategy. Otherwise, you risk “yelling into the void” without measurable results. Worse, you won’t know whether you’re differentiating yourself enough from the competition and effectively drawing the attention of your intended audience.

You might already have an idea of whom your competitors are, but it’s still essential to sit down and identify them. You might end up uncovering a surprise competitor who’s vying for your target buyer’s attention and engagement.

5. Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning

Segmentation, targeting, and positioning (STP) refers to the process of delivering “more relevant, personalized messages to target audiences.” In other words, rather than publishing posts and advertisements on a whim, you’ll go through a methodical process for creating content that resonates with your target buyer.

During the segmentation, targeting, and positioning process, you’ll take three steps:

Identify your target audience. This process not only entails interviewing your current customers, but carrying out market research and creating buyer personas.
Target a segment of your target audience. It’s best to speak to a narrow group of highly qualified buyers than to send your message out to everyone.
Position your brand relative to other brands. What do you do better than your competitors? It’s essential to map this information when creating a marketing strategy.

6. Content Creation

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Once you have your budget, competitive outlook, and STP information, it’s now time to take the most critical step: Creating your marketing content. But it’s essential to undertake this effort strategically. For one, you don’t want to publish random content that doesn’t solve for the customer, and for two, you must aim to capitalize on emerging trends so that your brand enjoys high visibility in the marketplace.

The competition is fierce across all formats. According to HubSpot Research, “half of marketers are using videos, with 47% leveraging images, followed by 33% posting blogs articles, infographics (30%) and podcasts or other audio content (28%).” Of these, video has the highest ROI.

Click here to see a larger version of this image.

It’s even more essential to invest in trends that have a high ROI, such as short-form video, influencer marketing, and social media DMs.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invest in blogging, one of the most proven content marketing techniques. It’s simply important to know where to allot the most resources, especially if you have a limited budget.

7. Metrics & Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

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Last, but certainly not least, your marketing strategy must include metrics and key performance indicators to understand how well your strategies are working. The KPIs you choose will vary depending on your business type and preferred customer acquisition channels. Examples of KPIs include:

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Organic Traffic
Conversion Rate
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)

Now, let’s dive into why it’s important to follow the steps of a marketing strategy.

The Importance of Customer-Driven Marketing Strategy Steps

A robust marketing strategy will reach your target audience — this includes those who have never heard of your brand all the way to repeat customers.

Without a defined strategy, you’ll essentially be throwing things to the wall to see what sticks. And it’s costing you cost, time, and resources.

There are seven key steps to crafting a successful marketing strategy: Build your marketing plan, create your buyer personas, identify your goals, select the tools, review your existing resources, audit and plan media campaigns, and lastly, execute your strategy.

Let’s get into the details of each step in the next section. Or you can jump to the section you’re most interested in.

7 Steps of a Marketing Strategy

Build a marketing plan.
Create buyer personas.
Identify goals.
Select the appropriate tools.
Review your media.
Audit and plan media campaigns.
Bring it to fruition.

Examples of Successful Marketing Strategies
What to Do After Following Your Marketing Process Steps

1. Build a marketing plan.

Wait, I have to make a plan for my strategy? What’s the difference?

Your marketing strategy provides an overview of the reasons why your marketing team will need certain resources, take certain actions, and set certain goals over the year. Your marketing plan is the specific actions you’ll take to achieve that strategy.

Not sure where to start? This free marketing plan template can help.

Download for Free

The right template can help you build a marketing plan that identifies your budget for the year, the initiatives your marketing organization needs to tackle, and the marketing channels you’ll use to implement those initiatives.

Plus, it’ll tie everything back to a business summary, to keep you aligned with overarching company goals.

2. Create buyer personas.

If you can’t define who your audience is in one sentence, now’s your chance to do it. A buyer persona is a snapshot of your ideal customer.

For example, a store like Macy’s could define a buyer persona as Budgeting Belinda, a stylish working-class woman in her 30s living in a suburb, looking to fill her closet with designer deals at low prices.

With this description, Macy’s Marketing department can picture Budgeting Belinda and work with a clear definition in mind.

Buyer personas have critical demographic and psychographic information, including age, job title, income, location, interests, and challenges. Notice how Belinda has all of those attributes in her description.

You don’t have to create your buyer persona with a pen and paper. In fact, HubSpot offers a free template you can use to make your own (and it’s really fun).

You can also use a platform like Versium, which helps you identify, understand and reach your target audience through data and artificial intelligence.

Buyer personas should be at the core of building your strategy.

3. Identify your goals.

Your marketing strategy goals should reflect your business goals.

For example, if one of your business goals is to have 300 people attend your annual conference in three months, your goal as a marketer should be along the lines of boosting online registration by 10% at the end of the month to stay on track.

Other marketing goals might be to increase brand awareness or generate high-quality leads. You might also want to grow or maintain thought leadership in your industry or increase customer value.

Whatever your goals, identify what they are and how your marketing organization can work to achieve them over the next year.

4. Select the appropriate tools.

Once you have your goals identified, make sure you have the right tools to measure the success of those goals.

Online software like social media schedulers gives you analytics to help you keep track of what your audience likes and doesn’t. Alternatively, you might consider Google Analytics to measure blog and web page performance.

Additionally, make your goals SMART – to do so, take a look at How to Write a SMART Goal [+ Free SMART Goal Template].

Here are a few tools that can help you track and measure the success of your marketing goals:

HubSpot Marketing Hub

The Marketing Hub allows you to consolidate all of your marketing tools into one centralized platform.

Too often, you’ll find a tool that’s powerful but not very easy to use. With this tool, you can attract users with blogs, SEO, and live chat tools. You can then convert and nurture those leads through marketing automation, the landing page builder, and lead tracking features.

With custom reporting and built-in analytics, you can analyze your data and plan out your next move. Plus, HubSpot Marketing Hub integrates with over 500 tools.

Pricing: Free; Starter, $45/month; Professional, $800/month; Enterprise, $3,200/month.

Trello

Trello keeps your marketing team on track and openly communicating about the projects they’re working on. Create boards for individual campaigns, editorial calendars, or quarterly goals.

Built-in workflows and automation capabilities keep communication streamlined, and simplicity keeps your marketing team focused on the work that matters.

Pricing: Free; Standard Class, $5/month; Premium Class, $10/month for 100 users; Enterprise, $17.50/month for 250 users.

TrueNorth

TrueNorth is a marketing management platform built to help you hit your marketing goals. Built specifically for marketing teams, TrueNorth turns your marketing strategy into a visual projection of your growth, which is used to create monthly milestones that help you stay on track.

One of the key benefits of TrueNorth is that it centralizes all of your ideas, campaigns, and results in one place, with everything tied back to your goal.

Pricing: $115/month (free for 30 days).

Monday.com

Everything on Monday.com starts with a board or visually driven table. Create and customize workflows for your team and keep groups, items, sub-items, and updates synced in real-time.

You can also transform data pulled from timeline and Gantt views to track your projects on Monday.com and ensure deadlines have been met. Plus, with more than 40 integrations — from SurveyMonkey to Mailchimp and, of course, HubSpot — you can visualize your data and ensure your whole company is collaborating.

Pricing: Basic, $8/month/seat; Standard, $10/month/seat; Pro, $16/month/seat; Enterprise, contact for pricing.

SEMrush

SEO continues to be a huge factor in the successful ranking of your website.

SEMrush allows you to run a technical SEO audit, track daily rankings, analyze your competitor’s SEO strategy, research millions of keywords, and even source ideas for earning more organic traffic.

But the benefits don’t stop at SEO. Use SEMRush for PPC, building and measuring an effective social media strategy, content planning, and even market research.

Pricing: Pro, $119/month; Guru, $229/month; Business, $449/month.

Buzzsumo

BuzzSumo allows you to analyze data to enhance and lead your marketing strategy, all while exploring high-performing content in your industry.

Use the platform to identify influencers who may help your brand reach, monitor comments, and find trends to make the most of every turn.

As your needs evolve, you can also leverage their crisis management and video marketing tools.

Pricing: Plus, $179/month; Large, $299/month; Enterprise, contact for pricing.

Crazy Egg

Need to optimize your website this year? Consider getting started with Crazy Egg. You’ll be able to identify “attention hotspots” on your product pages, track ad campaign traffic on your site, and understand if shoppers are clicking where you want them to.

You can even make sure your “Buy Now” buttons are in the best place.

Crazy Egg also offers recordings, A/B testing, and more to help ensure your website is offering the best user experience.

Pricing: Basic, $24/month; Standard, $49/month; Plus, $99/month; Pro, $249/month; Enterprise, contact for pricing.

5. Review your media.

Decide what you already have in your arsenal that can help you create your strategy. To streamline this process, think of your assets in three categories – paid, owned, and earned media.

Paid media means any channel you spend money on to attract your target audience. This includes offline channels like television, direct mail, and billboard to online channels like social media, search engines, and websites.
Owned Media refers to any of the media your marketing team has to create: pictures, videos, podcasts, ebooks, infographics, etc.
Earned media is another way to say user-generated content. Shares on social media, tweets about your business, and photos posted on Instagram mentioning your brand are all examples of earned media.

Gather your materials in each media type and consolidate them in one location to have a clear vision of what you have and how you can integrate them to maximize your strategy.

For example, if you already have a blog that’s rolling out weekly content in your niche (owned media), you might consider promoting your blog posts on Twitter (paid media), which customers might then reTweet (earned media). Ultimately, that will help you create a better, more well-rounded marketing strategy.

If you have resources that don’t fit into your goals, nix them. This is a great time to clean house and identify gaps in your materials.

6. Audit and plan media campaigns.

Cleaning house segues straight into this step. Now, you must decide which content is going to help you.

Focus on your owned media and marketing goals. For instance, will updating the CTAs at the end of your blog posts help you increase RSVPs to your event?

Next, look at your buyer personas. Let’s say you work for a video editing software company. If one of your persona’s challenges is adding clean sound effects to their videos but you don’t have any content that reflects that, make a 15-second demo video for Instagram to show how great your product is at solving that challenge.

Finally, create a content creation plan. The plan should include topic clusters, goals, format, and channel for each piece of content. Be sure to include which challenge it’s solving for your buyer persona.

For ideas on content creation or a more in-depth look at how to create a content plan, check out our post, The Ultimate Guide to Content Creation.

7. Bring it to fruition.

At this point, your market research and planning should help you visualize how your strategy will be executed – and by which teams.

The final step is to bring that all together and assign actions to your plans.

Create a document that maps out the steps you need to take to execute your campaign. In other words, define your strategy.

Think long-term when creating this document. A standard strategy document is 12 months. This structured timeline should be the home base for your strategic marketing efforts.

To paint an example, let’s go back to the video software company.

Maybe in January, you will launch a software update that improves the exportation process for users. In April, you want to publish an ebook that explains editing terms to your buyer personas, and in September, you plan to launch an integration with other software.

Remember, your digital strategy is unique to your business, so the document should be as well. As long as the strategy includes the pertinent details outlined in previous sections, you’ll be set.

Now that we’ve explored the critical steps of a complete marketing strategy, let’s look at some “Why didn’t I think of that?” strategies to inspire your own.

Examples of Successful Marketing Strategies

1. Regal Movies

Digital strategy: Owned media

Regal Movies took the Halloween spirit to a new level, even renaming its Twitter account to reflect the spirit of the season. This “Monster Madness” poll is a fun, interactive way to get followers invested in Regal’s content:

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Regal’s tweet is an example of owned media because the company was in full control of the answers followers gave (and, apparently, American Werewolf didn’t stand a chance).

Regal effectively kept true to their brand by using only classic movies in their poll while still putting a modern spin on it.

This is also a good example of how retweets don’t necessarily equal success. While four retweets aren’t that big of a deal, check out the votes: 461. That means there were over 400 interactions with a single tweet.

2. La Croix

Digital strategy: User-generated content, earned media

User-generated content is one of the best ways to gain traction in your strategy.

It demonstrates your appreciation for loyal customers, builds community, and also incentivizes other users’ to promote your products for the chance at a similar shout-out.

Plus, sometimes the content your brand loyalists create is really, really good.

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In this case, the consumer is praising the brand’s product. Doesn’t get better than a fantastic review like that.

3. Small Girls PR

Digital strategy: Event marketing

Wait, is that Keke Palmer?

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Small Girls PR is a boutique PR company based in New York, and one of the company’s talents is throwing amazing events for their clients, like Olay. This event recap carousel on Instagram is an effective event marketing example, as it boosts awareness for your brand and offers social proof by featuring a public figure.

4. Superside

Digital strategy: Paid media

Design agency Superside launched an Instagram ad to promote a lead magnet: Their digital ad design guide. While the brand may have created the guide specifically for paid promotions, it’s also possible that they repurposed a high-performing blog post into a downloadable ebook.

In this case, all they had to do was repackage their current content, build an ad around it with creative assets, and run it.

In previous sections, we discussed the power of leveraging multiple forms of media in your marketing strategy. This is a great example of it.

5. Target

Digital strategy: Paid media, Twitter cards

If you’ve got the budget for paid media, take full advantage of it.

Paid media is when you pay social channels, like Twitter, to promote your content on their site. By doing this, your content reaches new audiences you might not be able to reach organically:

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This inclusive ad from Target about fall shopping uses Twitter cards to promote the brand and make shopping easy with the click of a button.

More social channels are offering ways for shoppers to purchase in-app or close to it, driving sales and boosting exposure for brands.

What to Expect After Following Your Marketing Process Steps

Ultimately, creating a complete marketing strategy isn’t something that can happen overnight. It takes time, hard work, and dedication to ensure you’re reaching your ideal audience, whenever and wherever they want to be reached.

Stick with it (and use some of the resources we’ve included in this post), and over time, research and customer feedback will help you refine your strategy to ensure you’re spending most of your time on the marketing channels your audience cares most about.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in October 2019. It has been updated for freshness and accuracy.

When you have an active website, consistently coming up with blog ideas can be a challenge. So, what do you do when it feels like you’ve written about everything under the sun?

Even the most seasoned marketers could use an occasional brainstorming boost. If you need inspiration, here are 101 of the best blog post ideas for your content marketing strategy.

Table of Contents

Multimedia Blog Post Ideas
Data-Driven Blog Post Ideas
Community Engagement Blog Post Ideas
Instructional (Guides and How-to) Blog Post Ideas
Multichannel Integration Blog Post Ideas
Thought Leadership Blog Post Ideas
Content Marketing Blog Post Ideas
Miscellaneous/Fun Blog Post Ideas

Blog Post Ideas

Multimedia Blog Post Ideas

Multimedia blog posts focus on using a piece of media — whether that’s a video, a podcast, or a graphic — to tell a story or share information.

The key to success with this type of blog post is to make it shareable. Whichever multimedia element you choose to include, make sure it’s original and branded so that when it gets shared, people will connect it back to your company.

1. Write a listicle blog post using GIFs that your readers can relate to.

2. Create an interactive quiz, such as “Which type of marketer are you?” or “How well do you know [insert topic]?”

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3. Recap your latest company event with photos and/or videos.

4. Share a video product demo.

5. Create a branded graphic that demonstrates your process or strategy.

6. Make a video that highlights your industry and write a post about it.

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7. Start a podcast and transcribe each episode into blog posts.

8. Record an interview with a customer and conduct a corresponding write-up.

9. Upload a photo diary of how your company celebrates culture.

10. Create an infographic about industry best practices or trends.

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Data-Driven Blog Post Ideas

Data-driven blog posts rely on data and industry insights to make a point. While this information can be sourced from other brands or industry reports, using original data to demonstrate your company’s role in the space can result in more unique blog posts.

11. “We Asked X Experts About [insert topic]; Here Are Their Best Tips.”

12. Survey industry professionals to gather data on their challenges/processes/tools/best practices, and share the results in a blog post.

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13. Make an infographic about your analytics and break down the pros and cons of each.

14. Research the most important statistics for your industry and compile a comprehensive list.

15. Break down your blog traffic and explain how you generated it for each channel.

16. Share the best apps your team uses to get work done.

17. Make a list of the best tools for your industry.

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18. Explain your company’s knowledge base and why it matters.

19. Do an in-depth case study about your customers and examine the results.

20. Research your customers’ favorite products and share the results.

21. “Here Are X Stats Every [Role] Should Know.”

Community Engagement Blog Post Ideas

If you are part of a niche or local community, then these blog ideas are for you. Community engagement topics are a way to spotlight key players doing great things in an effort to boost company culture, brand loyalty, or employee morale.

22. Spotlight local leaders or companies in your field.

23. Interview a local business owner.

24. Create a survey about your area’s business ecosystem and share the key findings.

25. Highlight user-generated content.

26. Spotlight a client and share a story about their business.

27. Share real-life examples of your product use cases.

28. Spotlight employee stories to inspire your audience.

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29. Ask for guest posts from community members.

30. Run a product or service giveaway for readers.

31. Throw a community-based event and recap it on the blog.

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Instructional (Guides and How-to) Blog Post Ideas

A common blog post category for B2B and B2C companies that want to improve their SEO is how-to posts. These types of blog posts explain how to do something or answer a question readers are searching for.

To get more insight into what questions or topics your customers are searching for online, look up a search term relevant to your blog and look at the “People Also Ask” section of the search results. You can then use these questions to help guide your blog strategy.

32. A list of “musts” for a career in your field.

33. Interview an industry heavy-hitter about their tips for businesses.

34. Post a series on how to land a job in [your industry].

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35. Write a roundup about “X Things I Wish I Knew When I First Started.”

36. How to gain the right skill set to advance in your career.

37. The hardest part of your job — and how you tackle that.

38. Tips to handle burnout.

39. Write an ultimate guide.

40. Create pillar pages, or topic pages that link to a variety of other articles on the same subject.

41. Bust common myths about your field.

42. Demo how to use a specific social media channel.

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43. Write about how to properly research and collect data for reports.

44. Recommend the best tools for completing daily tasks related to your product or industry.

45. Share the benefits of a current trend your company has mastered.

46. Answer the top questions people have about your industry.

47. Break down how to write a blog post using your own blog as an example.

Multichannel Integration Blog Post Ideas

Your company’s blog is just one channel for your marketing strategy. For blog ideas that focus on multichannel integration, the key is to share the marketing methods you use on your other channels like email and social media.

48. Discuss top social media trends.

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49. Explain how your most recent Instagram Live session engaged your audience.

50. Rank the top-performing social media channels for your brand.

51. Dive into a social network’s latest update.

52. Explain how you use Instagram Reels to grow your engagement.

53. Spotlight a brand killing it among multiple social channels.

54. Share the best Twitter threads you’ve seen about your industry.

55. Share a breakdown of your best-performing email campaign and why it worked.

56. Discuss how your brand uses LinkedIn to connect with your community.

57. Share your top social media analytics services and explain why they’re great.

58. Break down the most important email marketing metrics using examples from your own email campaigns.

59. Explain how video channels like YouTube or TikTok can be an asset to your business.

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60. Take a stance on a recent blog post from your favorite news-sharing site.

61. Round up recent news in your industry.

62. Share snippets from your company’s ebook in a roundup.

Thought Leadership Blog Post Ideas

Thought leadership content is used to demonstrate your company’s expertise in a certain topic or industry. These types of blog posts should establish credibility and position your brand as a trusted resource with a unique perspective.

63. Describe what your mission statement means to you.

64. Dive into how a company boosted its blog traffic exponentially.

65. Break down what an ideal company culture would look like.

66. Write about ways your company is focusing on diversity and inclusion.

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67. Based on trends from the past year, what are your predictions for the industry’s future?

68. Come up with a list of company outings for remote teams/employees.

69. Describe how your team combats burnout and provide helpful tips to avoid it.

70. Create a list of industry trends to keep an eye on.

71. Compare and contrast different topics about marketing, business, or your industry, such as different types of advertising.

72. Post a recap of breaking industry news.

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Content Marketing Blog Post Ideas

While almost everything on your blog is considered content marketing, these specific types of blog posts help market your company by giving readers a glimpse into your product, processes, and team.

73. Develop a blog post series dedicated to your company’s FAQs.

74. Invite an industry leader to contribute their expertise as a guest blogger.

75. Curate an office playlist and share the tracklist.

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76. Profile a team member to showcase the company culture.

77. Interview a customer and share their results.

78. Repurpose a case study into a blog post.

79. Repurpose a white paper or guide into a blog post series.

80. Write about your day-to-day workflow.

81. Have your team share their favorite ways to use your product.

82. Share key takeaways from a recent industry conference you or your team attended.

83. Explain the ways content marketing has helped your company meet its business goals.

84. Post a “Year-in-Review” about lessons learned throughout the year and how to apply them to the year ahead.

85. A roundup of your most popular blog posts.

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86. A roundup of ways your team conducts successful content marketing.

Miscellaneous/Fun Blog Post Ideas

Who says your blog has to be buttoned up all the time? Show off your brand’s personality with these fun blog post ideas.

87. Share photos or videos from your team’s recent travels.

88. Curate a list of quotes.

89. Give an office tour.

90. List of books that inspire professionals in your industry.

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91. “What has changed about our workflow habits over the years?”

92. Compile a list of weekly/monthly aspirations.

93. Break down your favorite historic moment in your industry.

94. Embrace popular holidays and make a themed post about them.

95. Explain common acronyms in your workplace or industry.

96. Start a series where remote team members share their daily work routines.

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97. Give a short history of your company.

98. A peer-curated list of hobbies outside of work.

99. Share highlights from a recent industry conference you or your team attended.

100. Examine a recent movie trailer and how its marketing should be noted.

101. Come up with a staff bonding event and recap how it went.

It’s easy to get wrapped up in the day-to-day of your industry, which means it’s also easy to run into the same types of blog posts. Blogs are important for SEO and lead generation, so picking the “right” topics is a crucial step in marketing planning.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published prior to 2017 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

I’d venture to guess you get tons of emails in your inbox every day.

From coupons to daily deal sites, from newsletters to your mother wanting to know when you plan to visit — it’s a lot to sift through, never mind actually open. So, what does it take for someone to actually open an email?

According to HubSpot Research, 65% of surveyed marketers say that subject lines have the greatest impact on open rates. After all, it’s your very first impression of the email. From that first impression, you’ll do your best to judge the content inside.

So what makes a good email subject line? It’s a message that conveys urgency, curiosity, personalization, and so much more. But it’s up to you to make that distinction of which fits best in your business offer and appeals to your audience.

Let’s take a look at a few examples that, old or new, we adore — plus what makes them so great. We have 100 awesome subject lines to offer you already, but read on for over 50 more that we found eye-catching.

(While you’re at it, check out our Out-of-Office Email Generator to make your email address even more delightful to your contacts.)

Retargeting Email Subject Line Examples

1. “We Saw You Checking Us Out 😏”

Sender: DollsKill

A clothing brand like DollsKill uses cookies to monitor what its customers have been eyeing. Sending an email subject line reminding them of items they admired can reel customers right back into their next purchase. The statement itself has a playful and conversational tone that comes off flirty, a reflection of its company branding.

The emoji also adds more fun and temptation to the message — reiterating that “you know you want to” feeling regarding items they have already clicked on before.

2. “Uh-oh, your prescription is expiring”

Sender: Warby Parker

Not too long ago, a HubSpot alum received this email two weeks before he needed to renew his prescription — talk about great timing. And when your eye prescription is expiring, it happens to be an excellent time to upgrade your glasses. By sending an email at the right time, Warby Parker increased its chances of this email getting opened.

But timing isn’t the sole reason we included this example. This subject line is brilliant because it appeared at the right time and with the right tone. Using conversational words like “uh-oh,” keeping the subject line sentence case, and leaving out the period at the end, the subject line comes across as helpful and friendly — not as a company trying to upsell you.

3. “The timer’s going off on your cart!”

Sender: King Arthur Flour

Similar to Warby Parker, this subject line makes use of urgency. If I don’t take action on my King Arthur Flour shopping cart — like actually buying the items — it will be cleared, and I’ll have to start all over again.

Okay, so maybe this is a low-risk scenario. But when it comes to my baking goods, I personally don’t like to take any chance of forgetting what I was going to buy. That’s where the personalization aspect of this subject line comes in: King Arthur Flour — especially its online shop — tends to attract both professional and home bakers who take all things culinary a bit more seriously than, say, someone who only buys flour on occasion from the supermarket. And wouldn’t you know? Those are the same bakers who probably don’t want to spend time building their shopping carts from scratch.

The moral of the story: Know your audience when you’re writing email subject lines. Is there something that they take seriously more than others? If so, incorporate that into your copy.

4. “What Did You Think? Write a Review.”

Sender: REI

I received an email with this subject line about a week after buying a portable stove at REI. I had just gotten back from a camping trip, too. It was perfect timing for them to ask me what I thought of it.

Companies ask satisfied customers to write reviews all the time. But when you specifically send these requests to the people who just purchased something from you, you’re being smart with your mailing list and reaching recipients whose interest is still warm.

Another reason this subject line works? It’s not expecting a good review. REI is genuinely asking me what I thought of the stove I bought. Maybe I hated it (though I didn’t). The company just wanted me to speak up.

5. “A Sneak Peek for VIPs Only.”

Sender: Serena & Lily

Loyal subscribers can preview clothing collections via email, as seen here with Serena & Lily. By offering a “sneak peek”, customers know they have more exclusive access and will want to click open the email to see what they want before the general public can see it.

This concept keeps the customer relationship alive and coming back for more if the email marketing is done right.

Straightforward Email Subject Line Examples

6. “👗 Free (Cool!) Clothes Alert 👖”

Sender: Clover

First of all, we have a not-so-secret love for emojis in email subject lines. Personally, I’m partial to turquoise — so when I see an email implying that I might somehow be able to obtain free turquoise clothes, chances are, I’m clicking.

That’s part of what makes this subject line work. It draws the recipients’ eye by using visual content (emojis), and it hints at an offer of something free. That hint is an incentive to open the email because there’s something to gain inside.

7. “🐶 Want a Custom Emoji of Tullamore & 6 Months FREE Walks? Book a Walk Today for Your Chance to Win!”

Sender: Wag!

For reference, Tullamore is the name of my colleague Amanda Zantal-Wiener‘s dog. And the subject line she received, written above, is another winning example of perfect emoji placement — especially when it’s a cute dog.

Here’s a great example of how personalization goes beyond the email recipient’s name. Wag!, an on-demand dog-walking app, includes the names of its customers’ pets in a portion of its email subject lines. But this type of personalization is more than just a first-name basis. If there’s anything my colleague Amanda loves more than free stuff and baking goods, it’s her pup. Wag! knows that, and by mentioning Tullamore by name in the subject line — in tandem with an offer, no less — it caught her attention and piqued her interest.

8. “Best of Groupon: The Deals That Make Us Proud (Unlike Our Nephew, Steve)”

Sender: Groupon

It’s hard to be funny in your marketing, but Groupon’s one of those brands that seems to nail it again and again. After all, who can forget this classic unsubscribe video?

This subject line is no exception. The quip, “(Unlike Our Nephew Steve),” actually had us

laughing out loud. Why? It’s completely unexpected. The first part of the subject line looks like a typical subject line you’d get from Groupon, highlighting a new deal. The parenthetical content? Not so much — making this one a delightful gem to find in your inbox.

9. “Rock the color of the year”

Sender: Etsy

In six words, Etsy was able to promote a product solely by its color, and inform you that there is apparently a “color of the year.” The email is truly too intriguing not to open.

Etsy is an e-commerce website for user-created marketplaces, and the reason we were impressed by its subject line was because of the way it uses mystery to drive value into a suite of products. This email isn’t an invitation to buy clothing or jewelry; it’s an invitation to find out what the color of the year is.

10. “How to live at home 24/7”

Sender: Feather

If you’re anything like me, the COVID-19 pandemic had you wearing PJs from day to night, only changing when you had Zoom meetings at work. As a social distancing precaution, you likely used delivery services instead of going out and getting food on your own — which means that you were effectively living at home 24 hours per day, seven days a week.

This email from Feather, a furniture rental store, perfectly encapsulates a frustration many of us faced: How do you live at home 24/7 without feeling like you’re going crazy? With this subject line, Feather promises to help you find a solution by using furniture that makes it easier to stay at home for extended periods.

Try it: Use a “How To” subject line to tell recipients what they can achieve with your products. Then, in your email, include links to the products that will help them achieve those goals.

11. “Take $20 off your order of $25 or more”

Sender: UberEats

You don’t always have to make your email subject line flashy. In this case with UberEats, just the offer alone is good enough to make any hungry customer click.

Your product offering, if it’s appealing, can speak for itself in your subject line. Customers know they can take advantage of the opportunity in the body of the email, as I will for dinner tonight.

12. “Where to Drink Beer Right Now”

Sender: Eater Boston

Okay, you caught me: I’m a beer lover. But that’s not what hooked me here. The subject line arrived in my inbox just at the time I needed it: at 6:45 on a Wednesday evening. Absolutely. Genius.

Think about it: You’re just over hump day and want to decompress with a few coworkers after work. Right as you’re about to head out, you get a notification on your phone that says, “Where to Drink Beer Right Now.” Perfect timing makes this subject line something you can’t help but click on.

For your own emails, think about how timing will affect how people perceive your emails. Even if you send an email in an off-peak hour, you could get higher engagement — if you have the right subject line.

13. “1,750 points for you. Valentine’s flowers & more for them.”

Sender: JetBlue

It’s such a specific number — 1,750 — of course you’re going to open this.

Coming from an airline, an offering of “points” might as well be gold to someone who likes to travel. And, if that recipient also has a significant other, sending this email leading up to Valentine’s Day is a home run.

The best part about the subject line above is how particular JetBlue was about the number of points available. Instead of, say, “20% off your next return flight of 1,000 miles or more,” this subject line gives it to you straight: 1,750 points, and all you have to do is buy flowers for your loved one. You’re already wondering how far you can fly with 1,750 points, I can tell.

14. “Free Oversized V-Neck.”

Sender: Los Angeles Apparel

I don’t know about you, but free is my favorite price when it comes to apparel. This brand has a simplistic and straightforward approach to its subject line by letting customers know what they can get in their next order.

And by keeping it short, it makes the subject line even more effective because the only other context the customer can see — is when they click open the email.

15. “Here’s that discount you wanted”

Sender: LAMODA

This subject line almost feels like it’s reading my mind. When I scroll through my endless emails, considering the businesses I want to buy from, I’m waiting for a discount or sale to be announced.

It’s straightforward and knows exactly what its customers want — key to getting clicks.

16. “3 ways to improve your Pins”

Sender: Pinterest

For those who love to curate their social feed, Pinterest is one of the best places to do it. For those trying to grow their following, they’re probably looking for all the advice they can get from the website itself.

Providing a numeric list of strategies to use in the ever-changing algorithm, it can prove useful to click on Pinterest’s emails periodically. This uncomplicated messaging in a subject line presents users with exactly what they’re looking for, right in their inbox.

Professional Email Subject Line Examples

Professional email subject lines have to strike a careful balance between authority and creativity.

These emails are often brisk and to the point. Full of transactional or time-sensitive content, there isn’t a lot of room in these emails for fun. This puts most of the creative weight on crafting a powerful email subject line.

The examples below can show you how to command, tease, and entice any subscriber to click on your professional emails.

17. “[Client] sent you a payment – it’s arriving [date]”

Sender: Bill.com

Bill.com is a popular tool for accounts payable, expense management, and more for small businesses. One of the secrets to their popularity is their useful automations. These workflows include emails that are direct, useful, and easy to scan.

For example, this email subject line is exactly what any freelancer or vendor wants to see in their inbox. In one short phrase, it tells them they’re getting paid, who’s paying them, and when it will land in their account.

This is another valuable example of why you want to personalize your emails. This subject line saves time while creating a great user experience.

18. “Signing completed for Screening Criteria”

Sender: Urban Development + Partners

Finding a new place to live can be stressful. The application process alone can take many steps, and it also usually includes sharing private information like rental history or recent pay stubs. It can sometimes feel like one tiny mistake will mean losing the home of your dreams.

This professional email series solves that problem with a unique email and subject line for every step in the process. The subject quickly covers which step is complete and why. So, when the next email, like “Your Rental Application”, appears in the inbox it’s clear that’s the next step in the process.

It shows how the right subject line can simplify the entire buying process for your audience.

19. “Your TSA PreCheck Eligibility Notice”

Sender: Universal Enroll

Some professional processes take longer than others. In fact, some processes can take months before everything is set. And no matter how patient you are, you might refresh your inbox hundreds of times waiting for that important update.

TSA PreCheck can be one of those processes, especially if an exciting trip is on the horizon. But this effective subject line gets right to the point. Any reader knows that once they open this email, they’ll have the answer they’ve been waiting for.

20. “[Action Required] Verify your email address”

Sender: Amazon Chime

One of the most valuable things that a professional email can do is motivate someone to take action. Vague email subject copy can lead to a situation where someone might open and read, but then again, they might not.

By using brackets in this subject line, Amazon emphasizes that the most important thing about this email is taking action. Then, it quickly outlines what needs to happen.

But while brackets are a great way to draw attention, try to use them sparingly. If every email includes brackets it will be easy for your readers to skip over them.

And the copy you include in brackets matters. Adding quirky or creative copy in brackets could be a fun creative decision, but it will erode your ability to add urgency to emails with brackets if you need to later.

21. “Parking Receipt – Parking Kitty”

Sender: Parking Kitty

Over 300 billion emails go out each day. While some users open every email, most email inboxes are an archive of emails that you don’t need to open now, but you save them because you may need them someday.

For example, email receipts. When you’re ready to find those emails in your inbox, they should be easy to find. But how many times have you scanned your inbox looking for a receipt and every email subject line is the same? That means opening and scanning every email, and a lot of wasted time for you.

Parking Kitty is the clever name of a parking mobile pay app in the Pacific Northwest. If you’re looking for expense report receipts after a recent trip, this email is easy to find in your inbox.

It’s also smart for brand awareness because it reinforces their memorable business name.

22. “Your free PDF is attached: Great Talks Most People Have Never Heard”

Sender: James Clear

Lifetime learning is essential in the business world, and this professional email subject line is perfect for busy thought leaders. It starts with a quick reminder that a free PDF is here. Then it shares the title of the PDF.

This may seem like an obvious subject line, but that’s what makes it just right. First, it reminds the recipient that they have a gift in their inbox. Next, it reminds them what that gift is. All the details are in the subject.

It’s an enticing offer, so there’s a good chance it will get opened right away. But it’s also crisp and clear, so it will be easy to find and download later.

23. “Whoops — we hadn’t had our coffee this morning”

Sender: Catchafire

Accidents happen to everyone. But professional emails often go out to thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people. This can make a small accident feel like a very big deal.

This subject line is gentle, funny, and honest. It uses a popular theme to acknowledge that the Catchafire team sent an email by mistake. It sets the stage for a quick apology and lets the person on the other end know that they can disregard that email.

While it can be tough to acknowledge an error, it’s often a great way to build a sense of trust with your email list. It can also save the time it would take to draft more individual responses to the email they sent in error.

Attention-Grabbing Email Subject Line Examples

24. “*Don’t Open This Email*”

Sender: Manicube

Ever been told to not do something? Being asked to refrain from something can actually have the opposite effect — you now want to do that thing even more.

That’s the strategy behind Manicube’s subject line. It’s a simple but effective way to make people curious enough to open your email. (Just be sure that the contents of your email have something worthy of that subject line.)

25. “Important Weather Advisory”

Sender: RCN

Any time we see a weather-related alert, our ears perk up. In RCN’s case, it isn’t just a way to lure recipients into opening an email. The subject line above is RCN’s way of updating its customers about potential power outages and driving attention to the brand that provides them with cable and Wi-Fi — even during inclement weather.

If you can hitch your email marketing campaign to an event you know people pay attention to, and have something helpful to offer in response, you’ll see your email open rate soar.

26. “What Can You Afford?”

Sender: Zillow

Imagine getting this subject line in your inbox from a website showing apartments for rent. It’s both exciting and encouraging (“Here are a bunch of apartments right in your budget. Yay!”), but also kind of competitive — pitting your cash against what the market offers. Would you click it? I certainly would.

Personalizing emails to cater to your audience’s emotions — for which there’s a broad spectrum when it comes to real estate — is key to getting people to open your emails. You don’t have to be a psychologist to know how to take advantage of them, either. In addition to principles like urgency, crafting an email subject line that implies scarcity is another great way to increase your conversion rates.

27. “As You Wish”

Sender: UncommonGoods

When writing emails, you should also think about the recognizable names and references that make people tick. For example, take this subject line from UncommonGoods forwarded to us from HubSpot’s Content Director, Corey Wainwright, who happens to be a die-hard fan of The Princess Bride. Apparently, “As You Wish” is a pretty big reference to that movie, so when she saw this subject line in her inbox, she just HAD to click.

Even though she knew the email was part of a larger-scale send, it almost seemed like it was tailored for her personally — after all, why else would it include a reference to Princess Bride in the title?

UncommonGoods knows its buyer persona like the back of its metaphorical hand. While it may not send emails to individual subscribers with references to their favorite movies in the title, it does have a general understanding of its subscribers and their interests.

28. “Not Cool, Guys”

Sender: BuzzFeed

We love BuzzFeed. If nothing else, its staff knows how to write great copy — and that sentiment includes an exceptional email marketing team. Many of my colleagues have signed up for BuzzFeed’s daily emails, and pretty much any day of the week, it wins for best subject line in their inboxes.

While there are a few of BuzzFeed’s subject lines here and there that aren’t anything to write home about, it’s the combination of subject lines and the preview text that is golden. They’re friendly, conversational, and, above all, snarky.

Here’s the text that followed the subject line above: “Okay, WHO left the passive-aggressive sticky note on my fridge. Honestly, who acts like this?” That conversational tone and snark pull us in over and over again — and it’s the preview text that completes the experience for me.

We’re not all equipped to be snarky writers, but most email platforms have the preview text easily available to edit. How can you use that little extra space to delight your customers (oh, and probably improve your email metrics)? Maybe you could use the subject line as a question, and the preview text area as the answer. Or maybe it’s a dialogue: The subject line is one person, and the preview text is another.

You get the idea. By using that space, you have more opportunities to attract new subscribers.

29. “DO NOT Commit These Instagram Atrocities”

Sender: Thrillist

No matter how humble people are, most don’t like to do things wrong. So why not play on that natural human tendency in an email subject line, especially if you’re in the business of helping clients (or prospective clients) succeed? Thrillist certainly does in the subject line above, and it makes the language even more vibrant by using do not — a great takeaway for B2B marketers.

Instead of using the typical contraction “don’t,” Thrillist spells it out and adds the all-caps for effect. That way, you’ll notice the subject line in your inbox, and then find it harder to resist clicking on it.

Think about how going negative in your marketing emails might be a good thing. For example, many of us have anxiety about looking silly, so figure out how you can play to those emotions in subject lines. Of course, it’s important to back up that subject line with encouraging, helpful content, so that you’re not just ranting at people all day.

Getting negative can get your subscribers’ attention — this subject line certainly caught mine.

30. “Everything you wanted to know about email copy but were too afraid to ask”

Sender: Copy Hackers

Here’s another great example of leveraging your audience’s full plate to your email marketing advantage. Who hasn’t refrained from asking a question out of fear of looking foolish or out of the loop? Excuse me while I sheepishly raise my hand.

” … but were too afraid to ask” is one of those phrases that, to us, probably won’t go out of style for a long time. People seek insights from Copy Hackers — an organization dedicated to helping marketers and other professionals write better copy, as the name suggests — because, well, they have questions. They want to improve. And when that audience is too afraid to ask those questions, here’s Copy Hackers, ready to come to the rescue with answers.

What does your audience want to know, but might be too embarrassed to ask? Use that information to craft your content — including your email subject lines.

31. “Abra-cord-abra! Yeah, we said it.”

Sender: Quircky

This punny email subject line from Quirky is plain fun. We’re suckers for puns in the right situation.

What we like most is the second part: “Yeah, we said it.” The pun in the beginning is great and all — it refers to a new invention featured on Quirky’s site to help everyday consumers detangle their numerous plugs and cords — but the second sentence is conversational and self-referential. That’s exactly what many of us would say after making a really cheesy joke in real life.

Many brands could stand to be more conversational and goofy in their emails. While it may not be appropriate to go as far as Quirky’s subject line, being goofy might just be the way to delight your email recipients.

32. “🔥 Hot freebie alert! 15 free gifts, you pick 5.”

Sender: Shutterfly

Shutterfly, a company that allows you to print your photos on interesting products or other frames, gets visual with its subject lines by occasionally using an emoji. Due to the company’s nature and creative audience, the fire emoji in this subject line draws the eye without feeling desperate.

The email subject line also pops because it has a lot of buzzwords, including “hot,” “freebie,” “gifts,” and “alert.” In just one line, it can give the potential reader a good reason to open it, especially if they love using Shutterfly.

The content inside the email aligns perfectly with the subject line by announcing a freebie promotion. This strong alignment between the subject line and message keeps people from skimming the email.

33. “From chaos to calm ✨🏡”

Sender: Open Spaces

If you’ve ever had a cluttered home, you know how chaotic it can feel. Open Spaces takes advantage of that by suggesting how you’ll feel after you use the company’s products.

Its emoji choices also indicate how your home will look and feel: Sparkling clean. I’m not a huge fan of cleaning, but Open Spaces promises to make it easy in the simplicity of their subject line. The brand also proves that it knows its target customer exceedingly well — if you want to create “open spaces,” you likely won’t tolerate chaos in your home.

In the same way, try to allude to the feelings that your target customers want to feel, as well as their goals and inner desires. You can also let emojis speak for you. For instance, if Open Spaces had used the subject line “From chaos to calm: Get a sparkling clean home,” the focus would be off of the “from chaos to calm” piece, which is what readers most care about.

34. “Welcome Gift! Offer Inside 👀…”

Sender: EyeBuyDirect

When you subscribe to a business you’re new to, you’d hope you can get a perk before your first purchase. EyeBuyDirect makes its statement in a subject line that makes the prospect feel like subscribing was a good choice, and strikes curiosity.

Without specifying what the offer is, the customer has no choice but to click and see what they can take advantage of.

35. “Colorful things for colorful homes”

Sender: Baggu

I can’t speak for you but I’m a sucker for all things bright in color. And what makes this an attention-grabbing email subject line is that this brand is known for making reusable bags (hence the name).

This email makes its customers imagine a new type of product they could be revealing, and when I clicked, I was surprised to see all new items like towels, bedsheets, and more.

Now that we’ve covered the best subject lines in general, let’s dive into the best newsletter subject lines.

Newsletter Subject Lines

Newsletter subject lines must work harder to get the recipient’s attention because they allude to information only. In contrast, a subject line offering a discount will automatically make the recipient want to click.

Newsletter subject lines must hook the reader and get them to click. The examples below do an excellent job of it.

36. “China Falls, Sleepy Unicorns, And The Deals Aren’t Bigger In Texas”

Sender: Crunchbase

The Crunchbase Insights email has an interesting way of wrapping details about all the stories it will present to you in one subject line. This is eye-catching because it seems like an odd mashup of words, but gets to the point about three complicated stories at the same time.

When it comes to email, Crunchbase is known for its longer, text-based emails. They all read like a more conversational letter to the email recipient and casually discuss and hyperlink Crunchbase’s top stories. While the subject lines feel interesting and eye-catching, the emails often report deeper business news that cut right to the chase.

This subject line shows how you can be punchy, but also fun and creative when trying to pull in your audience.

37. “Watch Out for This Amazon Phishing Scam.”

Sender: WIRED

In this subject line, WIRED includes Amazon, a large company name. Including the name of a big brand can be a great way to boost open rates because people who enjoy or use products from big brands might click into a subject line that discusses them.

Additionally, when a brand name is combined with negative words like “phishing” or “scam,” people might open the email much more urgently so they can learn how to avoid running into the issue being discussed.

WIRED also lists the story last in its newsletter. This is an interesting way to get your readers to scroll through the entire email and see the other stories before they get to the story that led them to click into it.

38. “Buffer has been hacked — here is what’s going on”

Sender: Buffer

Next is a subject line from Buffer. A few years ago, Buffer got hacked — every tech company’s worst nightmare. But Buffer handled it exceptionally well, especially on the email front.

What we admire about the subject line is that it’s concise and direct. In a crisis, it’s better to steer clear of puns, snarky comments, and emojis. People want to see that you’re taking the situation seriously and be reassured that the world isn’t ending.

Because of the way the subject line is worded and formatted, you feel like Buffer is calm and collected about the issue, and is considering your personal safety. That’s pretty hard to do in just a few words.

39. “Google sees smartphone heroics in Oreo. It’s The Daily Crunch.”

Sender: TechCrunch

If you’re subscribed to a newsletter from a publication like TechCrunch, chances are, you signed up because you’re either interested in or want to learn more about technology. To reflect that, the media outlet crafts its daily email roundups (“The Daily Crunch”) with a subject line that reflects one of the latest, most compelling news items in the industry.

Here’s the thing: Staying on the cutting edge is hard, especially with something that evolves as quickly as technology. So, by writing email subject lines that reflect something recent and relevant, TechCrunch is signaling to email recipients that opening the message will help them stay informed and up-to-date on the latest industry news.

Think about the things that your audience struggles to keep up with — then, craft an email roundup and matching subject line that reflects the latest news in that category.

40. “Black Friday shoppers are the worst customers”

Sender: LinkedIn

This subject line is likely the boldest of the Black Friday emails you’d see in your inbox in the days before Thanksgiving. Yes, it’s a bit judgmental, but it actually came in a LinkedIn Pulse newsletter, promoting an article one of its users wrote on the topic of holiday marketing.

And there’s no doubt the title resonates with how some people feel during the most hectic holiday shopping day of the year.

LinkedIn has nothing to sell on Black Friday, so the subject line above does little harm to its business. Nonetheless, commenting on a popular cultural observation can show your confidence and help you relate to your community.

41. “New recipe alert 🚨”

Sender: Hello Fresh

While Hello Fresh is a food service that delivers meal packages to its customers, it also provides customers with home kitchen tips and tricks in email newsletters. These extra resources encourage home cooks to try new things, and being offered new recipe ideas is an exciting opportunity.

Using an emoji here is simple and draws the customer’s attention, while the offer itself can only be viewed in full when clicked — an easy way to draw in more aspiring home cooks.

42. “Tips to increase remote collaboration”

Sender: Asana

This simple subject line from Asana, a project management platform, gets straight to the point: If you open the email, you’ll find remote work tips and beyond. The subject line also effectively capitalizes on an increasingly common trend that rose during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Its simplicity and trendiness ensure that you’ll want to open the email.

And chances are that if you’re using Asana, you’re likely using it to collaborate with colleagues whom you might not see every day, even if you’re not fully remote. Asana effectively appeals to a wide range of potential users and buyers with this subject line.

43. “I got Botox — & THIS is what it looked like”

Sender: Refinery29

Okay, so maybe your business doesn’t involve Botox. But still — are you intrigued? I am, and despite my better judgment, I clicked.

That’s the power of leading your emails with a story: It sparks curiosity, which works in two ways. There are times when our natural curiosity can pique our interest without context, such as the example above. But in this case, the subject line implies that there’s an intriguing story ahead. Why the heck did this person get Botox? And what did it look like? As the saying goes, “Inquiring minds want to know.”

Think of the stories behind your industry, then find ways to include them in email newsletters and frame them within the subject line in a way that piques your recipients’ collective curiosity.

44. “Improve Your Website from Concept to Code 💻”

Sender: Namecheap

Want people to open your newsletter? Tell them how they’ll benefit straight away like in this newsletter subject line by Namecheap. It used this subject line for Inspire, its monthly newsletter, and like in the WIRED example, it left the subject line story last so users would scroll through the entire email.

Like many examples on this list, it uses an emoji to draw the eye and keeps the tone of the conversation more casual and fun. In contrast, the subject line “Improve Your Website from Concept to Code” feels much more wooden and unfriendly.

45. “The best options for grocery delivery”

Sender: Wirecutter

Simple, right? But effective. This newsletter’s subject line from Wirecutter gets straight to the point and solves one of the biggest challenges we faced during the pandemic: How to get groceries while social distancing. If you’d never used grocery delivery services up until that point, you’d likely be at a loss for what services to use.

Wirecutter realizes that and immediately invites you to open the email with a simple and actionable subject line.

46. “Mark your calendar for these key dates!”

Sender: Omaze

Omaze is known for raising money for charities across the globe in the form of raffling once-in-a-lifetime opportunities with each donation. Contributors love to learn more about the charities at hand, and the sweet prizes they could win along with them on a monthly basis.

By announcing its upcoming opportunities, it can help people choose which causes they’ll want to give toward, and be excited to contribute when the time comes.

47. “‘I didn’t realize architecture was so dangerous’”

Sender: Dezeen

Dezeen is an architecture and design publication whose newsletter subject lines always feature a comment from a user. Only one comment is chosen every week.

This approach is brilliant for various reasons: 1) It makes you wonder why the user made that comment and will make you click through. 2) It makes you want to comment on the publication’s posts to potentially get featured. And 3) It takes the work out of writing a subject line. Indeed, Dezeen doesn’t have to write a subject line at all, because its readers do it for them.

Here are a few comments that have been featured of late:

“Absolute garbage”
“The cardboard box aesthetic”
“Meet The Flintstones”
“Does it come with a smoke machine?”

If you have a publication that’s often commented upon, consider using one of the comments as your subject line.

HubSpot Email Marketers’ Favorite Subject Lines

Above are some of the best subject lines we’ve gathered, but we asked both former and current marketers on our team to give some additional favorites and what makes them so good:

48. “Hmm…No writing activity last week?”

Sender: Grammarly

“If or when you turn their plugin off, Grammarly’s retention strategy is great. They reach out with subject lines like these that immediately drive me to click through and turn their plugin back on. Very well done.”

— Jordan Pritikin

49. “Drooling over email designs 🤤”

Sender: Really Good Emails

“Emojis always catch my eye amongst the 100+ emails I receive daily. As an email geek myself, this subject line matched my interests and piqued my curiosity.”

— Ashley Riordan

50. “Can you help me name this dance, [First Name]?”

Sender: Marie Forleo

“It’s personalized and piques my interest because A) I’m being asked for input and B) I want to be in the know about this mysterious dance (#fomo).”

— Christina Perricone

51. “Who you gonna call?”

“If you can make a pun, include a social reference, or even just a familiar phrase, it’ll catch people’s attention.”

— Clint Fontanella

52. “Shoes You Can Wear All Damn Day”

Sender: Everlane

“Swearing is controversial in email marketing, but I think it worked really well in this email from Everlane. Not only was it a clever and concise way to introduce their new line of footwear called ‘The Day Collection,’ but it also aligned with the brand voice they use in other emails and across their website.”

— Anna Fitzgerald

53. “You were on point last week 🎯”

Sender: Grammarly

“Grammarly is so good about rewarding you and making you feel good about your writing.”

— Jordan Pritikin

54. “Show them what you’re made of”

Sender: Canva

“Using empowering, positive, and defiant language to leverage the use of Canva tools — love it.”

— Lucy Reddan

55. “‘Not intended for swimming’”

Sender: Dezeen

“I’m a sucker for architecture, and Dezeen’s weekly newsletter tells me the top new projects that come up, as well as their reader’s responses to them. My question is: What’s not intended for swimming? And if it’s not intended for swimming, why did the architect build it? Boom, you’ve got my interest. And my click.”

— Ivelisse Rodriguez

56. “Our #1 most asked question…”

Sender: Supergoop

“What an easy way to get me to click — by trailing off and leaving the rest of the content in the email. Nicely done, Supergoop.”

— Ivelisse Rodriguez

57. “[First Name]! You’re One of HubSpot’s Top Blog Readers 🎉”

Sender: HubSpot

“No one actually likes taking feedback surveys. Not unless you earn money, and not many of them offer that. When I received the above email from our very own HubSpot blog, I clicked straight through, and voila! There it was: A feedback request. Turns out, flattery does work.”

— Ivelisse Rodriguez

The Best Email Subject Lines are Simple and On-Brand

When writing subject lines for your emails, keep it engaging, simple, and on-brand. Don’t forget to appeal to the emotions and needs of your target buyers, and most importantly, have fun — include emojis, puns, or references to pop culture. Your emails will get opened, guaranteed.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in November 2013 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Your personality makes you unique — a differentiation that doesn’t just apply to people. Brand voices will make each company recognizable in a world full of different streams of information. So how can you set your brand up for success?

A powerful brand voice that can not go unnoticed, because it is strong enough to make people pay attention. This post explores the elements that create a brand’s voice. You’ll also learn how you can create your brand voice and examples that can inspire your team.

Table of Contents

What is a brand voice?
Creating a Brand Voice
Brand Voice Examples
Brand Voice Template
Crafting Your Voice

Your brand voice should be uniform across platforms. According to Crowdspring, 90% of potential customers expect to have a similar brand experience across different platforms. Your company should sound the same on social media, in email communications, and even on packaging.

Further, your company’s voice should resonate with your audience and be used to build trust. In the U.S. market, 46% of consumers prefer to buy from brands that they can trust.

Your brand voice should build that trusting relationship, showing your customers what to expect from your company’s content, services, and even customer service.

Plus, the right approach can help attract new prospects before they even learn about your product or services. For instance, consider the humor used in MoonPie’s social media posts.

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Before I’d even purchased a MoonPie for the first time, I followed them on Twitter. Why? Because I liked the brand’s voice. Their tweets made me laugh and felt relatable.

However, a brand voice doesn’t have to be funny to be powerful. Other powerful brand voices can be inspiring, emotional, bold, casual, formal, poetic, or direct.

Creating a Brand Voice

How do you know if your brand voice is working? If a potential customer feels like you’re talking directly to them, then you’re doing it right.

When your customers feel like they’re part of the conversation, they feel more connected to the brand and are more likely to buy from you.

See more tips for building your brand’s voice below.

1. Start with your company’s mission.

Your brand’s mission or value statement can help you determine some key characteristics of your brand voice.

For instance, consider A Good Company’s values page:

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You’ll see these values — transparency, eco-friendliness, and modern instead of traditional — embedded in every piece of content you read from A Good Company.

Now, let’s check the following post:

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The writing is clear, straightforward, and direct to support the brand’s transparency values. The writer takes the angle of eco-friendliness in the opinions expressed throughout the piece (i.e., “so much stuff already exists in the world”).

And, finally, there’s a casual, informal tone to the voice, hinting at a company that isn’t old-school and doesn’t take itself too seriously (i.e., “pick up some ‘on fleek’ style bargains”).

You’ll want to consider your own values when creating a brand voice. Those values can become key characteristics of your voice.

2. Use your buyer persona as inspiration for your brand voice.

When creating a brand voice, then, it’s vital you consider your buyer persona. Who are you trying to reach? What do they need from your brand? What can your brand offer them that no one else can,

Audience research can help you determine other types of content that perform best with your audience, which is undeniably helpful when creating a strong voice. For instance, perhaps you could survey your audience or use an analytics tool like Google Analytics to determine other sites your readers frequent.

Figuring out what else they consume is helpful here — your voice should be different if your readers often consume Buzzfeed content versus the New York Times. The Buzzfeed audience might prefer more casual, funny writing, while the latter probably likes more academic-style content.

Your audience will be the ultimate test of whether you’ve created a successful brand voice. If your voice doesn’t resonate with your audience, keep experimenting.

3. Look at your best-performing content.

If you’ve already been publishing content for a few months or even years, then take a look at your top-performing pieces and write down key characteristics of the voice used in your writing.

Is your top-performing piece more poetic? Does it include trends and pop-culture references? Does it dive deep into a topic and include original research to back up its claims?

Ultimately, these pieces are already resonating with your audience, and it’s likely (at least in part) due to voice. Take note of which aspects of the voice you feel can, and should, be replicated across your brand as a whole.

Also, you need to do some research about which content formats are best for your industry and how you can align that with your brand’s voice.

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4. Make a do’s and don’ts list.

Oftentimes, determining brand voice starts by asking: “What don’t we want our brand voice to be?”

Figuring out what you don’t want your brand voice to be is a critical step in choosing the right voice for your brand.

For instance, perhaps your team brainstorms the following statements:

Our brand voice is not pretentious.
Our brand voice is not too serious.
Our brand voice is not grandiose.
Our brand voice is not unfriendly.

Once you’ve taken a look at these statements, you can begin forming the antithesis. For example, if your don’t list looks like the one above, your brand voice may follow the ethos below.

Our brand voice is down-to-earth and authentic. It’s funny and casual. It’s humble. And it’s helpful.

5. If necessary, use a third-party agency to determine brand voice.

Forbes’ BrandVoice is a media partnership program that helps brands reach and resonate with their audiences through expert consultancy and direct access to Forbes audiences.

Take a look at how Cole Haan worked with Forbes to create content related to style, arts, travel, social impact, and more. Each piece uses a unique voice to target the intended audience for that category.

If you’re struggling to create a unique brand voice or you don’t know how to adapt your vision to the different areas of your business, consider using a program like BrandVoice or a third-party content marketing agency. This will help you take your brand’s game to the next level.

6. Create a communications document so all of your content is aligned.

Once you’ve created your brand voice, you’ll want to ensure your entire company can use that voice in all marketing materials.

If your company only uses internal writers, consider creating a training course for new staff so they can learn how to write for your brand. If you work with external guest contributors, you’ll want to make public-facing guidelines to ensure all your writing captures the appropriate voice.

7. Fill out a brand voice template with 3-5 core voice characteristics.

Use a table to formalize your process. Write down the 3-5 core characteristics you’ve determined are important for your brand’s voice and how your writers can use these traits in their writing.

This step is important for translating ideas into action — how can your writers create a “humble, authentic voice” in their writing? Give some examples or tactical advice to make it easy for your brand voice to come through in all of your content, regardless of byline.

To explore what a template could look like in practice, take a look at the brand voice template below.

Brand Voice Examples

Before you start crafting your unique voice, turn to role models who have perfected their tone. Here are five examples to get you started. You can see other distinct brand voices in the video below.

1. Spotify

Whether you’re watching a TV ad, driving past a billboard, or scrolling Spotify’s social accounts, you’ll see a consistent voice. The brand’s tone is consistently funny, edgy, direct, and concise.

For instance, take a look at this video, which is part of a Spotify advertisement campaign from 2019, “Let the Song Play.”

As you can see, Spotify doesn’t take itself too seriously. The ad makes fun of people who get so emotionally invested in a song that they won’t resume their plans until the song ends.

You’ll see a similar brand voice play out on Spotify’s social channels. On its Twitter account, for instance, the brand often posts tweets related to new music in a casual, friendly manner.

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If Spotify’s brand were a person, she would be witty, sarcastic, and up-to-date on today’s pop culture references. You’ll see that personality play out across all of Spotify’s communication channels.

2. Mailchimp

When exploring Mailchimp’s brand voice, turn to the company’s Content Style Guide.

In the Style Guide, Mailchimp writes, “We want to educate people without patronizing or confusing them. Using offbeat humor and a conversational voice, we play with language to bring joy to their work.… We don’t take ourselves too seriously.”

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Even in the Style Guide, you can hear Mailchimp’s brand voice shine through. The company consistently achieves a conversational, direct, playful voice in all its content.

For instance, in this blog post, the brand writes about various “highly unscientific personas”, including the fainting goat. The email service provider describes this persona by saying, “when startled, its muscles stiffen up and it falls right over.” They then link out to this hilarious video.

As you can see from this example, you can evoke brand voice in subtle yet effective ways. If the blogger had instead written, “If a goat is scared, it becomes nervous. The animal’s muscles contract and it faints as a result”, the writer would’ve evoked a voice more aligned with a scientific journal than Mailchimp.

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3. Fenty Beauty

The About Us page for Rihanna’s beauty company reads, “Before she was BadGalRiRi: music, fashion and beauty icon, Robyn Rihanna Fenty was a little girl in Barbados transfixed by her mother’s lipstick. The first time she experienced makeup for herself, she never looked back. Makeup became her weapon of choice for self-expression.”

It’s clear, even just through this short snippet, that Fenty Beauty’s voice is bold, direct, and poetic. Language like “transfixed by her mother’s lipstick” and “her weapon of choice for self-expression” reinforce this voice. However, the tone is also undeniably casual — the way you might talk to your best friend.

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You’ll see this voice play out across all Fenty social channels, including this YouTube video description:

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The first statement, “The blur is REAL!” — along with phrases like “No-makeup makeup look”, and the shortening of the word “combination” — all evoke a sense of friendliness.

The brand voice matches its target audience perfectly: youthful millennials and Gen-Zers who care about makeup as an opportunity for authentic expression.

4. Clare Paint

Clare, an online paint site, has created a mature, spirited, and cheerful brand voice to evoke a breezy, girl-next-door feel to their branded content.

For instance, consider the title of one of their recent blog posts, “6 Stylish Rooms on Instagram That Make a Strong Case For Pink Walls.”

The post uses phrases like “millennial pink”, “pink walls have obvious staying power”, and “designers and DIY enthusiasts alike have embraced the playful shade with open arms.” The brand’s language is friendly, chic, and professional, relating to its readers while simultaneously demonstrating the brand’s home decor expertise.

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This voice is clear across channels. Take a look at this Instagram post, for instance.

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“When baby’s first bedroom is on your grown-up vision board” makes the brand feel like a good-natured older (and more fashionable) sister. The reference to the COO’s baby boy is another opportunity to make authentic connections with Clare’s followers.

5. Skittles

Skittles often posts hilarious social media posts that strip away any promotional, phony language so you’re left with something much more real.

Take a recent tweet, for instance, that reads: “Vote Skittles for Best Brand on Twitter so we can keep our jobs!”

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The brand voice, which is clever and original, does a good job of making prospects and customers feel like they’re chatting with a mischievous employee behind-the-scenes. The “I can’t believe they just posted that” factor keeps the content fresh and exciting.

Plus, the brand does a good job making pop culture references, like this Mean Girls reference, to highlight the brand’s youthfulness.

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Skittles’ use of absurdity and humor plays into their iconic commercials. In one 2022 ad, the company pokes fun at targeted ads.

While two people watch a youtube video, they comment that their ads are so targeted that it feels as if Skittles is listening in on their conversation. Then, a man with a boom mike drops through the floor.

Skittles expertly keeps the same tone across media, showing their brand’s commitment to their voice.

Brand Voice Template

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Looking to make a template for your own brand voice? HubSpot is here to help! You can fill out this blank Google Sheet template with your own brand voice characteristics. Then, fill out the remaining cells, and send them along to your team.

Collaborative, you’ll be able to create a unique brand voice to help your company stand out.

It’s important to note, you’ll be prompted to make a Google Drive copy of the template, which isn’t possible without a Google account.

Crafting Your Voice

And there you have it! You’re well on your way toward building a strong, compelling brand voice for your own business.

Remember: A good brand starts with good content. And good content can’t exist without a strong voice.

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