If you find the marketing tool market overwhelming, let me assure you that you’re not alone.

In a recent Marketing Fix newsletter issue, I wrote about the Era of Subscriptions and how I realised that my annual marketing tools budget is ca $6,000. Ugh!

I figured it might be helpful to share my marketing tool stack with other practitioners, too.

Perhaps, this expert-tested and carefully curated collection will help you find your next virtual helper – and save you many hours.

Below, you can find my go-to tools and software in 5 categories:

1. Marketing tools for ideation, copywriting, and visuals
2. Social media and email marketing tools
3. Web design, optimisation, and SEO software
4. Tools for creating courses, workshops, and videos
5. Productivity and time tracking apps

But first, I’ve included some thoughts on the subscriptions industry, as well as recommendations on how to select the best marketing tools for your project.

If you’re looking for the list of tools, scroll right down.

Welcome to the Era of Subscriptions, A.K.A. order a puppy for 5 hours

Early 2020s. The main subscription-based articles in our lives are SaaS tools and gym memberships.

Year 2025. Most of us are signed up for 20+ subscriptions. 

“No way, the number can’t be that high,” you say?

Now consider your recurring payments to mobile apps, newsletters, video streaming, music, news, magazines, podcasts, groceries, coffee, Amazon Prime, health & beauty products, gym & classes.

The greatest evil must be Apple’s iCloud Storage, designed to grow YoY.

Name one thing that can’t be found in subscription format.

Animals? Wrong!

How did we end up in a world where even toothpaste is subscriptionised?

Over the past 5 years, the subscription economy has been fuelled by many things, among them Covid-induced laziness of the Western urban population and laws allowing marketplaces to elude social taxes of precarious workers.

No small role was also played by the tech investors dreaming of hockey-stick growth charts of ARR.

The best way to procure the ARR as a brand with a physical consumer product? Introduce monthly subscriptions.

Welcome to the Era of Subscriptions.

Annual subscription fee: $7,600+

Having recently adopted many new productivity and marketing tools (free + paid), I was curious to see how much the invoices in my inbox and bank account add up to.

I found a sleek (and free) Subscriptions Tracker template on Notion Marketplace and entered all my expenses under 7 categories.

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Work & Marketing software:

• Ideation, copywriting, and visuals
• Social media and email marketing
• Web design, optimisation, and SEO
• Courses, workshops, and videos
• Productivity and time tracking

Lifestyle & intellectual interests:

• Productivity & task management
• Lifestyle, health, and arts

Monthly spend: €618

My initial reaction was a big “Ughhh!”

I knew there were a few expensive marketing tools there, but I wasn’t expecting the total sum to be this much.

Alright, it’s not that bad, I thought, when looking at the per-month aggregate.

But then I switched the chart input to calculate the yearly budget…

Annual spend: €7,429

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The resulting sum is, frankly, horrifying

How on earth!?

And I don’t even subscribe to food delivery or streaming services…!

You’ll find the full list of my subscription expenses below.

But first, a bit of life philosophy.

How much is too much to pay for marketing tools?

After overcoming the initial mini-shock, I went deeper and considered what value each tool adds to my work and life:

• Enabling work projects
• Increasing productivity
• Improving daily life

And so on…

If you’re planning to do the same exercise, here are 3 POWs that might be helpful.

1) Pragmatic: cost / value

Am I making more money thanks to a tool than I spend on it?

2) Productive: cost / time

Saving money feels great, but isn’t your saved time even more valuable?

3) Emotional: cost / happiness

Is the subscription making a significant improvement to your quality of life?

Cheap = expensive

These days, ever more distractions compete for our 16 hours of daily waking time.

There also seems to be more worthwhile projects these days, compared to 10 years ago.

In personal life, this means more friends to catch up with, events to socialise at, articles and books to read, recipes to try, cities to (re)visit, exhibitions to see, barre classes to attend, cafes to linger at, and moments to capture and share.

On the work side, I’m a freelance marketing consultant who also maintains a blog, newsletter, and creates marketing courses.

I wince at the thought of all the hours I’ve spent on LinkedIn to build new connections, write and design posts, and keep in touch with colleagues and clients.

Don’t even mention Instagram…

Saving money feels great until you realise your time is even more valuable.

When selecting the tools for my work, I’d rather spend a bit more to get the industry’s best.

Going with a cheaper option might save you €/$/£100 here and there.

But product limitations (fewer features, low-quality design) + the extra time spent are simply not worth it.

As to productivity and lifestyle subscriptions, some save you time while others, in fact, waste it.

Ask yourself whether that Netflix subscription is actually making you happier – or smarter…

Ok, let’s return the focus on marketing software now.

Investing in tools = investing in growth

Over the past 6 months, I’ve spent ca €2,500 on:

• Marketing and productivity software
• Substack newsletters
• Marketing & design templates

The sum seems rather exuberant in retrospect.

And yet, there’s no other way I could have delivered all my projects without this investment.

Perhaps, I could have chosen a cheaper blog theme than Blocksy Pro (€289/lifetime). Or a cheaper course platform than Kajabi (€209/month). Or used Mac’s free screenshot tool instead of Cleanshot ($29/lifetime).

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, I would have saved ca €500.

Certainly, I would have paid in tens (if not 100+) of extra hours, lower-quality branding, and the resulting lost opportunities.
​

Do I regret spending a little fortune on software & tools in 6 months?

No, the investment has well paid off.

I’m even considering getting two extra tools: 🐒

• Superhuman to declutter (and de-stress) my inbox experience, flooded with too many newsletters
• Notion Pro for better LinkedIn giveaways & course resource management

In order to make money, you need to spend money

I was reminded of this point of view last weekend, while weeding my garden.

I was listening to a recent Delivering Value podcast episode with Maja Voje.

She said that it took her years to realise: “In order to make money, you need to spend money.”

The logic rings more true than ever.

Over the past 6 months, I have…

• Worked on two long-term marketing consulting projects
• Wrote a 360-degree marketing audit for three companies
• Rebranded my newsletter to a new strategic focus and design
• Switched my blog theme and redesigned most of it
• Created and launched my first-ever marketing course
• Grew my LinkedIn account to 13k+ followers with 2-3 posts/week

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​The list is not a complaint. Nor is it a boast.

We all have to work, and many of us enjoy the process.

I love learning new skills; I thrive when (self-)challenged.

The list is the key reason why I looked up and tested tens of new marketing tools and began paying for several of them.

I also made several one-off purchases of other marketing experts’ resources (like Maja’s GTM Checklist) to improve my skill set faster. (These are not included in the Notion doc.)

Below, you can see the full list of the paid and free tools that I use in my marketing projects and personal life – my Mary Poppins bag of marketing tools.

My Mary Poppins bag of marketing tools

First, an important clarification…

The Mary Poppins “purse” is a model of the ’60s carpet bag.

Among other paraphernalia, it contained a hat stand, a mirror, a houseplant, and a floor lamp.

Thx God the marketing tools are virtual. The only thing they weigh down is one’s bank account balance.

All the marketing and productivity tools mentioned are ones that I currently use or have used for some client projects.

I hands-down recommend them all.

Without further ado, here they are.

1. Marketing tools for ideation, copywriting, and visuals

​Figma PRO: Design for website, ad creatives, social media posts, newsletter, etc.

​Canva: Design tool for marketers who haven’t yet learned to use Figma

​Adobe Firefly: AI-generated images, e.g the featured images in this blog

​Adobe Express: Editing images, e.g. removing background and changing size

​Grammarly: Checking spelling mistakes in my Google Docs, newsletter, social posts

​CleanShot: Taking high-quality screenshots and adding special edits + recording GIFs

​ChatGPT: Researching ideas and topics, getting copywriting angles (never the full text)

​Miro: Workshops and brainstorming for consulting projects

2. Social media and email marketing tools

​KIT: My go-to newsletter marketing tool for Marketing Fix

​Sparkloop: Newsletter referrals for Marketing Fix

​Taplio: The very best LinkedIn tool for analytics and content generation

​Texts: Mac desktop app that consolidates all your messages, e.g. from LinkedIn and Instagram

​Octopus CRM: My go-to tool for growing LinkedIn follower base with automated invitations and welcome messages

​Instantly: The best sender domain warmup tool to ensure your emails land in the Inbox

3. Web design, optimisation, and SEO software

​Blocksy PRO: Super flexible & high-quality WordPress theme used for this blog

​Wisepops: Hands down the most flexible and good-looking pop-up tool

​Lasso: Website add-on for beautiful product offer layouts

​Wappalyzer: Browser extension that shows all the tools and pixels on any website

​Moz: Top SEO tool, I use their free browser extension for optimisation & research

​SemRush: Top SEO & PPC tool, I use the free version extension for research

​SimilarWeb: Web and SEO analysis tool, I use it for site traffic analysis

4. Tools for creating courses, workshops, videos

​Kajabi: All-in-one course management platform, best in the industry

​Tally: Typeform-style tool for collecting user feedback and doing website surveys

​Senja: The very best tool for collecting and showcasing testimonials

​Typeform: Top website form tool with lots of features and layouts

5. Productivity and time tracking apps

​Calendly: Meeting scheduling

​Teamweek: Now Toggl Plan, I’ve used it for task management for 5+ years

​Toggl: Time tracking for freelance projects and every other work-related task

​Notion PRO: Project management and documentation + content management

​Slack: Better turn your phone notifications off

​Evernote: Desktop app that I use for note-taking and drafting texts

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Et voilà, this was my list of marketing tools and software that I use daily.

The awful – or good – thing is that looking at this list, there’s nothing I’d willingly give up.

And yet, I’m going to play Easter Egg hunt this weekend and hide some of those from my bank account for good.

This time, too much is too much.

Wondering what to do next?

Get bi-weekly marketing and growth advice by joining 15k+ marketers in the Marketing Fix newsletter community.

Recommended articles for further reading:

• The very best marketing newsletters in 2025
• 105+ LinkedIn ad examples from top B2B brands
• My 55+ predictions for 2025 marketing trends

The post The Marketing Tools That I Use Every Single Week appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

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Ever downloaded an industry trend report or e-book?

As for me, I’ve downloaded 100+ of those….

Why?

The landing page text might say things like “we polled nearly 1,800 designers and developers from four continents…” (Figma) but, of course, I never read the promo text.

Because it’s the impeccably designed cover that gets me.

Like 8 billion other human animals, I’m a visual creature. The design team at Intercom wins the beauty pageant – as well as my email address that I exchange for the PDF – the email that will receive tens of marketing newsletters over the next 3 months until, finally, I open one of them to scroll down to the almost-transparent unsubscribe link.

So why do I download trend reports and e-books? (Why do you?)

Perhaps, it’s the human curiosity, the FOMO that scares you to miss out on some very important shifts in the industry, game-changing tactics, considerably pleasant ways to waste a few hours of your working day.

Be it as it may, trend reports (and other kinds of e-books) work. Especially in enterprise-level B2B sales where their purpose isn’t as much education but…

Leaving the impression of an established, industry-leading brand.

And, naturally, collecting hundreds of potential future clients’ emails. (You already know what to do next with those…) 🌚

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THE question is: Do trend reports lead to sales & revenue growth?

The short answer is: Yes.

But let’s rephrase the question: Are trend reports worth your marketing team’s time, effort, and the ad budget that goes into promotion?

The answer shifts to: Maybe.

It takes A LOT of time to create a trend report. The reason I know is because I just wrote, designed, and promoted one.

Together with Sera, the super promising Estonian startup building AI SDR (you should check them out!), we decided to create the 2025 Trend Report: How AI Will Change Sales Operations.

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The joke’s on me because Sera’s team is essentially three people. And, obviously, there are no designers. (In Estonia, the first designer enters the game as ca 60th hire – hence the high success rate of local tech companies.)

So when creating the 30-page trend report, 70% of my time went into designing the thing.

As a result, I learned so much about cutting corners with Figma Library templates and unearthing legit-looking 3D icons for $80. More on this later!

As I use Toggl to track the time spent on clients’ marketing projects, I can more or less present the breakdown of a trend report creation timeline.

Time spent on creating & promoting a trend report:

• Research + discussions with team: 8 hours
• Writing the content (drafting with ChatGPT Premium): 10h
• Designing the PDF from zero: 16h
• Designing ads + social content for promotion: 6h
• Setting up ad campaigns: 1h
• Designing, copywriting, and setting up landing page + website popup: 4h
• Setting up post-download email automation: 4h
• Random back-and-forth + reporting: 6h

In total, we have… 55 hours. 🥲

And let me assure you that if there was a team of 3-5 people (plus extra stakeholders) working on the project, the time spent would be at least 5-6x higher.

Now, add to this resource pillage the paid advertising budget…

… and what your get are pretty damn expensive leads.

So you better know exactly what you’re doing when starting to work on an industry trend report.

Time for the first Moomin break.

Should you create & promote a trend report?

Here are 5 reasons not to:

1. It costs a lot of time, consider the alternative things your team could do with it.
2. You need to have industry expertise (or be great at learning fast from other industry leaders (fairly easy, tbh)).
3. Once the PDF is ready, you have to promote it. Otherwise, nobody will find or download it.
4. You need to keep milking the report for weeks if not months to justify point 1.
5. The leads that come in via download need a lot of nurturing before converting.

But then again…

Here are 10 reasons why trend reports are worth it:

1. You’ve exhausted other acquisition channels or maxed out the spending to ROAS limit.
2. You’re a new startup and want to quickly establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
3. You’re willing to invest in the long game, and turn leads into clients via marketing automation.
4. You’ve never tried it before – marketing is all about experimentation.
5. You want a high-quality resource to share with existing leads and include in outreach emails.
6. You invest in a long-form content piece to turn into… LinkedIn posts, webinars, blog articles, etc.
7. You gather and visualise statistics that gets picked up by other blogs and media publications, resulting in high brand reach & awareness.
8. You use the trend report as one stage in your marketing funnel, not as a one-stop acquisition channel.
9. Your marketing team is too big and has no higher-ROAS projects to focus on (cut the headcount).
10. You establish your annual trend reports as a thing people look forward to, à la Spotify Wrapped or Adobe’s Creative Trends report. And make them so fun / innovative others will do the distribution for you.

To sum it up: Trend reports are worth it if you do them well.

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How to create an industry trend report that people want?

For better or worse – and this is my aesthetic brain typing – the content of a trend report is 20% of its attraction and efficiency. The rest is design (40%) and marketing (40%).

Here’s the zero-to-one process I followed when creating the AI x Sales trend report for Sera.

#1 Research

The obvious first step was to ask Sera’s founders what we should talk about.

Just as obvious as the founders not being marketing people so they gave me free rein. I was on my own, again.

So I went to spy on the competition, as well as the established B2B SaaS brands that I know to do great marketing (and design).

The best spy tool was LinkedIn Ads Library. For example, when I checked which ads HubSpot and Intercom are running, I quickly found their latest trend reports (set up as LinkedIn Lead ads).

To see the LinkedIn ads any brand is running, go to their Business page, navigate to Posts, and click “View ad library.”

When doing the initial research, I was looking at:

• Headlines and subjects of the trend report
• Structure of chapters and content
• Layout and design ideas
• Landing page + download form setup
• Marketing communication around the report

I created:

• A Google Docs with screenshots of various trend report ads, landing page URLs and content ideas
• A Google Drive folder with downloaded trend reports to keep referring to
• A Figma file with screenshots of good cover design + layout examples

This was about all I needed to be ready to write & design one myself.

Time for the second Moomin break.

How to write an insightful industry trend report?

Industry trend reports are essentially a grown-up version of e-books.

They’ve got to be longer, more insightful, and involve lots of statistics and charts.

Ideally, you’ve got lots of industry data – or customers to send a survey to.

As a startup, you have neither.

So I suppressed my anti-AI attitude for one day and asked ChatGPT to find statistics on relevant topics.

Like a good journalist ever, it wasn’t particularly forthcoming on its sources.

It became slightly more forthcoming once I’d upgraded to the Premium plan.

In any case, using ChatGPT, I regret to admit, saved me lots of time when writing the trend report (in a Google Doc).

Important to note: I rewrote most of the text ChatGPT provided, and prompted it to rewrite chapters 10+ times to get less jargony, repetitive, and much much more detailed and original.

After a long day’s work, I had finalised the content draft and shared it with Sera’s team for review.

And now we’re getting to my favourite part…

How to design a trend report PDF?

I began by looking for the easy options.

Canva had no good templates for e-books or other PDF formats.

Neither did the Google search for “e-book templates” yield any crop.

So I went to Figma Library and found some helpful magazine layouts.

What was most helpful was using the screenshots of other trend reports to create templates for the project. I could copy the right font size and alignment, as well as get inspiration for simple design solutions.

I’d also like to thank my past self for investing in a $80 package of fully customisable 3D icons I found in an online creative market. They really made a difference in the report looking expensive and trustworthy.

(My WIP Figma file looked a lot messier…)

Coming up with the initial style, design elements, and typography was so horribly difficult that after two hours, I gave up, thought why do I do this to myself, and decided to continue the next day.

The positive thing is that once I’d figured out the first 3 slides the next morning, it got a lot easier to design the rest via duplication and playing around with the branded colour scheme.

I’d even go as far as to say that designing the report became fun and gratifying.

By Sunday evening, I had the 30 pages designed and, once again, posted the result in our team Slack.

The founders approved.

It was time to make some final adjustments and export the PDF.

I uploaded it to Google Drive as “accessible to everyone with link” and started preparing (designing, uff!) the ad campaigns + social media (LinkedIn) posts.

How to promote a trend report?

I suppose you agree that this newsletter is becoming exhaustingly long.

So I’ll stop here, and send another dispatch on the promotion + results in the coming weeks.

While you wait, I’ve compiled a little award for those who reached the end of this soliloquy – a Figma file with some Library finds that were super helpful to me.

I also included some LinkedIn lead ad examples + good layout examples from my initial research process.

You can access the Figma file here. Sorry, this is only for newsletter subscribers!

The post I Created a 30-page Industry Trend Report. Here’s what I Learned appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

Every Friday, you’ll get new secret-sauce 🥫🥫🥫 growth strategies, free templates, and hacks I’ve used on 50+ startups. I also share occasional feisty opinion pieces (like this one).

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Seasonality in marketing means that there’s a fluctuation between high-growth and low-growth periods. This applies to every type of business. 

There are times of the year when customers line up to buy your product… And there are months when it feels like the whole world has forgotten about you…

Once you’ve been through a couple of annual marketing strategy plannings, you’ll begin to notice a pattern: these fluctuations are happening every single year.

For example, when doing the global quarterly marketing budgets at Bolt, I realized that it didn’t make sense to invest the same amount of budget (let’s say 100% / 12 months = 8.3%) every single month throughout the year. 

To make matters even more complicated, Bolt was operating in 25+ countries and hundreds of cities. The seasonality that, in the case of ride-hailing, depends on the weather and consumer patterns, was not the same across different markets. 

The high season in the UK v.s. South Africa v.s. Australia meant very different things – and very different months of the year. And yet – not all marketing leads of international brands think in terms of local seasonality.

Perhaps it was the need to plan 25+ markets’ budgets in a few weeks’s time that led us (not just me, there was a whole team of smart growth people and data analysts behind the project) to look into ways to structure and automate our seasonal marketing planning.

While seasonality is different in every industry, the strategic tactics are still more or less universal. And that’s exactly what this guide will be about: understanding the basics of seasonal thinking and applying it in your own marketing strategy, on top of being aware of the latest marketing trends.

P.S. Seasonality does not only affect your marketing results. It should be a fundamental consideration for the entire high-level business strategy, including product and growth. And this makes the approach relevant also for the CEOs and other people with fancy C-letter job titles. 

Feel free to follow along the step-by-step flow of the guide or jump to any section that interests you most. 

1. The principles of seasonal marketing planning
2. Understanding the seasonality in your business
3. Building the toolset and structure for seasonal strategy
4. Implementing the marketing strategy in sync with seasonality
5. Revising the marketing strategy as the market changes

So, so, so… Let’s go.

1. The principles of seasonal marketing planning

The first rule of Seasonal Planning is: you do have to talk about it before the season begins. 

The right time to plan the next year’s and next quarters’ business strategy and marketing budgets is not at the end of January (as it happens to be in 95% of companies). This should be done in November-December of the previous year. At least a few weeks before the next quarter begins.

Because… What if your highest-ROI period for marketing is right at the beginning of January? What if this is the best possible time to invest in low-cost advertising while the competition is still recovering for a Q4 holiday period “hangover?” 

Or even if the best time to launch a large-scale marketing campaign is at the beginning of March, you will have to start talking to the agencies and ad real estate vendors already a few months ahead in time to get the best possible deals + have top-quality creatives ready in time. 

If you’d like to get a better overview of your marketing strategy’s performance, answer these 80 Marketing Audit Questions.

The second rule of seasonal planning: not all months are created equal.

I can’t really think of a business that would benefit from the exact same level of consumer interest throughout the year. If you look at the chart by Statista – on online retail sales value in the UK – you see that there’s always a drop in Q1 and a huge spike in Q4. 

It’s common knowledge (I suppose?) that e-commerce brands have the highest number of sales in Q3, during the period leading up to Christmas. There are the shopping holidays like Black Friday and other made-up consumer fêtes. 

So if you’re not in e-commerce, it might be a smart thing for you to not invest in paid ads during this high-competition period. 

But what if the super competitive Q3 period is also when your business is growing the most? 

While during Black Friday Meta ads cost might go up, the data by Nest Digital indicated that also the ROAS (return on ad spend)  of Meta ads was higher. So, in the end, it was worth for some advertisers to pay (say 20%) more per 1,000 ad views because there was also a (say 45%) higher buyer interest.

So what are you to make of this? 

Should you invest more marketing budget during high-competition periods of the year (especially Q3) when the cost of advertising is higher? 

If this is the time of the year when the customers’ interest in your product is high then yes, you should.

However, and this is important (!): you should not invest the same amount of budget throughout the 3-month high-growth period. You should allocate most of your budget to be spent at the beginning of that period.

As you make a big marketing investment (say running a large-scale brand marketing campaign) at the beginning of a high-growth period, you will have a heightened customer interest throughout that period. Meaning more purchases and a higher total revenue. 

If you invest an equal budget during all three months of the high season, you will lose out on the momentum that a higher initial investment would have brought. By the time the last month’s investment should begin to deliver results and turn into conversions, the customer interest has already waned.

The third rule of seasonal planning: turn up the confidence level

I’ve made this mistake myself, and I’ve seen other marketers do it: when doing seasonality-based marketing planning, the difference in marketing spend between months is often minimal.

But hey, the worst case scenario is this (done by way too many companies):

I suppose you see what is wrong with the chart… Each of these months you would spend the same amount of money.

But during some months, the investment would bring you a 200% + ROAS and in other months, you’d have a negative return on ad spend.

If you’d stop reading the article here, you’d probably go back to your marketing budget plans and do something like this: a hesitant reshuffling of the budgets between months.

But no, this is still not what you need. Even now, you will spend way too little during months with 200% + ROAS and way too much during periods of low customer interest.

What you want to achieve with seasonal marketing planning and budgeting is something at least as bold as this:

The above chart doesn’t reflect any actual businesses’ marketing budgets. But what it does reflect is the biannual marketing spend boost that far-sighted brands do at the beginning of every high season. (Yes, there are usually 2 high seasons for businesses per year. But it can vary.)

How to create an annual marketing budget that, taking into consideration the seasonality in your business, allocates the most optional percentage of budget to each month? 

Mostly, by doing two things:

• Understanding the seasonality in your business through your data, competitive research, and common sense
• Creating a planning structure and toolset that helps you to create the optional budget allocation throughout the year

And then you can just lay back and enjoy the rest of the year. Nope, just kidding! That’s when the implementation of the campaigns begins. (We’ll cover that, too.)

2. How to map the seasonality for your marketing strategy?

The most efficient way to understand seasonality in your business is to use the help of data analysts. (Not kidding this time.)

But in case you do not have an army of analysts backing you up, there are things you can do on your own. Such as…

1. Look at the month-on-month new user growth of the previous years.

This is what I do most often with the companies I’m working with. You simply ask the CEO or whoever’s in charge of the company’s growth numbers to show you the report with monthly results.

You can look at numbers like:

• New revenue per month
• New trial signups per month and cost-per-signup
• Total number of purchases per month

When looking at these numbers, take into account the external factors (e.g. covid outbreak or economic slowdown) as well as the bigger marketing campaigns and product launches that might have affected these numbers. Try to get an accurate picture of high-growth months.

2. Talk to your team

Often, the Sales team has a good overview of time periods when the customers have a heightened interest in your company’s product/service. 

Also, you can check in with the CEO or various regional team leads that have a better understanding of the seasonality in various markets. Perhaps they even already have a month-on-month report (or next year’s business budget) at hand and they can share it with you.

3. Create a spreadsheet, understand the seasonality

What you’ll need is a spreadsheet that helps you understand which months are the biggest drivers of business growth.

In the example below (dummy data), I chose the New Revenue/MRR metric to calculate the percentage of each month’s growth of the total annual growth.

Alternatively, you could use metrics like New Sales/Purchases/Subscriptions or the number of New Customers as indicators.

Now, if you would use these percentages to allocate your annual marketing budget, you’d already make a significant improvement to the ROAS. However…

You can take a step further and identify the two high-growth periods, not just months. For example, in the above report, you can see that there are two spikes: a smaller one in late spring and another in the autumn.

By allocating more marketing budget to the beginning of both these periods, you’ll get a higher return on investment as the tailwind will deliver more sales in the weeks following a big investment (e.g. a large-scale ad campaign) boost as well.

The sooner you get your marketing engine working at high speed, the longer you can reap the benefits before the high season ends with (a lump of snow).

Don’t make the marketing mistake of throttling your spend when you should be investing.

Now that you’re aware of the seasonal drops and spikes in your business growth, let’s see how you can apply this know-how and make informed strategic decisions.

3. Building the toolset and structure for seasonal strategy

Almost all marketing planning, implementation, and reporting – if you ask me – happens in Google Docs and Sheets. 

So let’s use our Google Sheet to develop a seasonal marketing planning tool.

Step 1: Enter the annual marketing budget for the next year that you’re planning to spend. 

No worries if you do not yet know the exact budget. Make a guess. The way we will built the sheet will automatically adapt to the total budget changes.

Step 2: Decide the % you want to spend each month. 

Considering that the total amount you can spend in 100%, allocate a % of this to each month. 

• Aim to spend more at the beginning of the high season
• Don’t be afraid of spending very little during the low-performance months

I personally like to add an extra row that tells me how much in % I have left to allocate – it makes it easier to play around with different scenarios.

Take some time to play around with the budget scenarios. As I did the exercise myself, I first allocated a high budget % to the two months when I’d like to invest in a big marketing campaign (or simply increased digital ad spend).

As a result, I broke the total 100% and went down to -36% when adding percentages under other months. I revised and cut down the low-gowth months’ budgets further, as well as cut the budget of the higher marketing investment in March. 

Now that you’ve got the percentages, calculate the actual €€€ budgets.

Note that this approach with spreadsheet formulas is highly flexible: if you want to re-adjust your budgets later during the year, you can do it in a few keyboard taps instead of redoing the entire chart. 

Et voilà, your next 12 months’ marketing budgets are done.

Well… Of course your budgets are not done-done. Now, you will have to allocate the budgets further between the marketing channels. 

Note how in the high-spend months, you will have to adjust the regular marketing channels’ budget % to a lower percentage to keep the budgets on reasonable levels.

Ok. Now you actually do have the annual marketing budgets more or less ready. Time to share these with the management as well as regional teams and confirm if they also think your numbers make sense.

Expect a few rounds of changes, and be adaptive to others’ feedback.

4. Implementing the marketing strategy in sync with seasonality

I’ll keep the last two sections of this guide brief. However, I’d like to share a couple of suggestions that might help you to plan, spend, and grow better.

1. Communicate the quarterly marketing budgets to your team and start preparing early.

2. If you’re planning a big marketing campaign boost during some months, start working on the ideas as well as purchasing the ad placements (offline ads, TV, etc.) early on, ideally 3 months before the campaign launch.

3. Bring the seasonality into your marketing channel selection and messaging, too. Make sure your marketing offers and promotions reflect the season and the customers’ expectations.

Point 3 in other words: people only want to drink the Pumpkin Spice Latte in wintertime.

4. If you run a large-scale marketing campaign at the beginning of a high season, make your ads match the message for the rest of the season.

(People will recognise your ads and are more likely to react on them.)

5. Don’t be afraid to start winding down on your paid marketing spend towards the end of the high season. Focus on lifecycle marketing to your newly-acquired customers.

5. Revising the marketing strategy as the market changes

Last but not least, it’s important to be flexible about your annual and quarterly marketing budgets. 

More often than not, something will happen that you do not have the agency or power to control. Like the covid outbreak, like wars… But also the trends that you could not foresee. 

Be ready to change your marketing strategy at any time. Having a budgeting sheet with automated formulas helps. A lot.

Towards the end of each quarter, check in with the management, the Product team(s), and the regional teams to see what they’ve planned for the next months. And discuss how marketing can support their goals. 

Because, after all, marketing needs to reflect the company’s overall goals, not vice versa. 

Good luck with your annual marketing planning! 

Karola

P.S. If you liked the article and aren’t yet subscribed to my weekly Marketing Fix newsletter… It’s about time to sign up here. 

The post Seasonality in Marketing – How to Plan Your 2025 Budget for Higher ROI appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

This article is based on a keynote titled 5 Mistakes and Cures for Low-traction Startups that I presented at the Growth Marketing Summit in August 2022.

The room was packed with marketers. The screen was lit up with stupid (or, arguably, lovely) cat and raccoon GIFs. The air was filled with painful truths and aha-moments.

Essentially, everyone had gathered to find the answer to a burning question, albeit simplified: 

Are we making any mistakes in our marketing, brand, or product strategy? And how to fix it? 

Are you spending your marketing $$$ the right way or throwing them straight in flames? 💸🔥🚒

How I imagine the CMOs and CEOs must feel…

Taking a step further, it’s important to realize that marketing, brand, and product are intertwined. You can’t grow if one key aspect of your company is dysfunctional.

So instead of focusing on tiny mistakes like using on the wrong Facebook ad campaign structure or missing out on email marketing automation, I asked everyone to take the macro-level view.

Zoom out of your everyday work and consider your company from the birds-eye level.

Now, you’ll begin to notice the actual problems. And once you see them, you’ll be able to fix them.

But before we jump to the TOP 5 mistakes of low-traction businesses, I suppose I should briefly comment on why I am even the right person to talk about this topic…

20+ Marketing audits later…

For the past 1.5 years I’ve been freelancing as a marketing consultant, working with both B2C and B2B brands.

I’ve had the opportunity to speak to 60+ businesses and work with 20+ of them.

My favorite marketing collabs

Quite often, I begin a new marketing consultation project with a 360-degree marketing audit.

What is a marketing audit?

Read more: 80 Marketing Audit Questions – Free Checklist

The goal of a marketing audit is to understand how the company is doing in all aspects and channels of marketing and growth. 

It might also arise from burning questions like: 

“Marketing isn’t working. What are we doing wrong?”

Or…

“Are we using the full potential of all marketing channels?”

To compile a marketing audit, I request access to the company’s marketing reports, ad accounts, etc. I always set up calls with relevant team members to get their insights.

Once I have all the requested information, I’ll get to work…

Ultra busy checking ad accounts…

It usually takes ca 1.5 weeks to compile a marketing audit…

Typing down the 100th recommendation

In the end, I and my client end up with 60-70 pages’ worth of a Google Doc. It includes an overview of all the marketing channels. 

I also look into the onboarding process and product retention as it’s just as important a contributor to a company’s growth as new user acquisition. 

Below is a quick overview of the marketing audit sections that I generally cover.

Marketing audits cover more than just paid ads

In regards to each of the above topics, I share my advice on: 

🔍 The current state

🔍 Opportunities

🔍 Suggestions

We then meet with the marketing team – often the CEO joins as well – and discuss the key takeaways and, most importantly, how to go forward.

💫 Goals

💫 Action plan

💫 Work

As a result of a marketing audit, the company will have a clear understanding of how each of their marketing teams/channels/actions performs and how to improve it.

Now the real work begins!

Alright, sounds sort of legit… 

But what are the BIGGEST mistakes and priorities?

Let’s get right down to it!

Read more: 55+ Marketing Trends for 2025

🔥 Mistake #1: No clear goals

The first things in a marketing audit that I check are the company’s marketing KPI and growth reports.

I mean… 80% of the time I don’t check them as they do not exist. Rather, what’s been happening is the CEO or CMO saying:

“Let’s run some ads and find out who our customer is.”

 Or…

“We’ll find out the ROI and CPA once we start with marketing.”

Um… No you don’t!

You (the CEO or CMO in this case) should know the company’s growth forecast for the next 6-12 months. 

You should know where that growth is supposed to come from. And at what CPA, ROI, and payback period. How else do you intend to ever make your startup or early-stage business profitable?

Without clear growth goals, there won’t be a clear action plan.

The best a marketing team can do at such poorly-guided companies is to try to get “some” results. Without a long-term vision, this tends to result in wasting time on poor-quality social media posts or blog articles that nobody will actually read. 

Working 9 to 5… 🎵🎵🎵

Doing marketing without a clear understanding of the goals amounts to being busy for the sake of being busy.

If you don’t know where you want to go, you can’t get there.

If this sounds like your company, here’s a not-so-easy (and yet unavoidable) solution. You’ve got to demand clearer input from the top management.

The only fix to Mistake #1 is getting clear input from the CEO

Top management needs to know the goals

When consulting various companies in growth and marketing, I always begin by establishing a detailed Marketing KPI Tracking sheet. Together, we fill in the past 3 months to see if there’s any past data on the LTV and CPA per lead and paying customer.

Up next, I collaborate with the CEO or CMO to understand the next 6 months’ revenue goals and work down to other growth and marketing projections based on revenue expectations, churn, LTV, and expected CPAs. 

All this leads to having…

🗝️ A clear 6-month plan

🗝️ Alignment of marketing & product

🗝️ No gut-feeling-based surprises

… on the high level. And on the marketing team level, you’ll have…

💫 Clear expectations (numbers)

💫 Revenue, ROI, LTV

💫 KPIs and measurement

Ready for the takeoff

Once we know all this, we can proceed to implement the planned marketing activities and campaigns.

Moreover, as you know the expected KPIs, you can compare whether your results match the projections and make quick adjustments (e.g. channel & budget allocation) if needed.

🔥 Mistake #2: Amazing product, bad packaging

Remember that quote used in startup blogs and books around the 2000s? 

“If you build it, they will come.”

Well, as it turned out as I googled it, the words come from a movie titled Field of Dreams.

When talking to various businesses – both B2B and B2C – I’ve realized that many of them have a very strong product and there’s a high potential for finding product-market fit.

However, their website and ads looked like out of an early aughts’ financial scam.

Great products need great packaging

Around 10y ago it was still possible to build a breakthrough product and get people using it via engaging the early adopters and betting on word-of-mouth.

In 2022, this is no longer the case. Almost all business verticals are saturated with tens of businesses building a similar product. 

Even if your product is the best in the industry, you’ve got to earn the user’s trust. And nobody these days trusts a brand that looks low-quality.

People don’t buy from brands they don’t trust

Take this example of a well-known fintech company…

Here’s what their website home page looked like in 2012. (IDK how it didn’t look sketchy already down in 2012, but anyhow…)

Would you trust your money to this company in 2022? Hopefully not.

Of course, they know that design trends as well as website-development opportunities have changed over the past 10 years.

Today, the same company’s home page looks like this:

Looks 100x more legit, doesn’t it? 

It is told that your brand should be good enough not to get in the way of growth.

But how to tell whether your branding is good enough? I usually suggest a simple exercise:

Ensure your brand is at least as good as the competitors’.

But don’t just go with the gut feeling – your own baby will always look sweeter and smarter than those of others.

Ask three types of different audiences to evaluate your website / App Store listing and to grade its quality and trustworthiness.

🍪 Ask a brand/marketing expert

🍪 Ask your friends

🍪 Ask 10 neutral people

And what shall you do once you realize that your brand really isn’t as strong as it should be?

Hire a branding expert or agency to help you out.

Now, let’s get to the next mistake that’s the exact opposite of having a strong product and a low-quality brand.

🔥 Mistake #3: Amazing brand, no product-market fit

You can trick people on a date with your product…

… But they’re free to leave any time.

What this means is that you can spend a lot of money on paid advertising and other venues for customer acquisition.

However, if your product fails to deliver on its promises, the new customers will immediately churn.

I’ve often seen Product and Marketing teams fighting over this conundrum. Is it the fault of the product or marketing that you fail to attract new paying users with a high LTV?

Sometimes, as I ask during a marketing audit what the customers think about the product, I hear that all the users are huge fans and give positive feedback. 

“The feedback from 20 customers tells that the product is great…”

The problem with such easy-way-out customer surveys is that you might send an email asking for feedback to 1,000 users. But only the ones who like your brand will answer. 

The few fans would of course tell you almost anything you want to hear. But is it the information that you actually need?

Yes this is Dog I like the product

Here’s the problem…

People who are disappointed in your product do not bother to reply to your emails. Nor do they fill in the surveys.

So how can you get honest, relevant, unbiased feedback about your product?

By hiring a group of 10-20 random, neutral people who more or less fit your target audience group and getting them into a room or on a 1h call one-by-one. You can then ask them to test the product and to give honest feedback.

The goal here is to uncover the real issue. The most common issues include:

🔥 Solving an inexistent problem

🔥 Not the best way to solve a problem

🔥 Too expensive (time + money)

The solution to a non-existent product-market fit is, well, to find it. And it’s not going to be easy – you’re going to have to make substantial changes to the feature set, pricing model, or another product aspect. Or pivot completely.

P.S. By “improving your product” I do not mean building new cool features that seem like quick wins. This almost never works. A meaningful product change will probably take months, but will also be worth the effort.

Looks like we’re steering away from marketing and spending too much time on the product? Thing is, no marketing can make people use a bad product.

But let’s get back on the marketing track for now…

🔥 Mistake #4: Lack of focus

Most marketing teams are constantly on the lookout for new user acquisition and growth channels.

At one point, this will lead to your team of 1 or 20 – depending on the size of your company – working on many different channels at once.

Most of the time, focusing on so many marketing campaigns at once will lead to a big bold mess.

If this looked like your marketer, keep reading. Salvation is coming.

One of the most common suggestions I write down in marketing audits is this: Stop working on this marketing channel.

❌ There’s no point to post on social media if your posts are not original

❌ There’s no point to create another blog article on a topic that’s been covered 100x

❌ There’s no point to work with influencers if you don’t see measurable results

Consider all the marketing activities that you and your team spend time on and ask: Is this bringing us new customers and revenue? 

If the answer is no, stop working on that marketing channel.

Quite often, I recommend to my clients to focus only on paid advertising and automated emails for a while. 

If you can’t make paid ads work for you, the chances are low that you’ll find substantial growth opportunities in any other channels.

You can drag along for a year or more doing low-impact work. Or you could just spend the time and salary money on running 4 weeks of paid ads.

Instead of 12 months, you’ll find out in 1 month whether there’s a product-market fit / whether your brand is strong enough.

To explain this a little further, I’ll share a quick story from my Bolt years.

As one of Europe’s biggest mobile advertisers, we received a pitch from a new ad platform every week. They promised lower cost-per-install and lower cost-per-purchase prices than we had in Google or Facebook ads.

However, we always turned them down.

Why?

Because their platforms could reach only 1% of the people we could reach with our Facebook and Google ads. 

Why would we spend time on working on tiny marketing channels instead of funneling all our efforts into scaling and improving our top channels? 

Instead of wasting your team’s time on tiny marketing campaigns that promise low-cost results, focus on the activities that bring results on scale.

🥲 Kill your darlings and cute pet projects 

🥲 Focus on 3 high-potential growth channels

🥲 The same applies to product features

As a result, your team’s focus and output will improve. You’ll have to work less, but will yield better results.

To put this in Moomin terms: instead of reaping ten unripe green pumpkins, you’ll get one big juicy pumpkin.

Continuing on the subject of (vegetable) growth, we’re down to the last mistake…

🔥 Mistake #5: No growth loops

Whenever you bring a new user into your product, the first challenge is to keep them there for the first 3-5 minutes.

If you achieve that, you’ve likely got an excited user looking to explore your product further.

While it usually falls on the Product team to increase retention, reduce churn, and keep users happy over a long period of time, there are points in the in-product user journey that fall under the Marketing team’s radar. Such as…

• Post-signup retention newsletters that urge the user to complete their profile or try the product
• Post-onboarding requests to refer a friend
• Automated lifecycle marketing emails that keep bringing people back into the product/store

Know your retention stages – Image source

If you forget to think about user retention, you’ll be filling a water bucket with a hole in the bottom.

You might bring in 10,000 new users… But in 2 months only 20% keep using your product.

My friend where are tho?

Yup, that’s sad.

But there’s more than just retention marketing that you can do.

You can also build growth loops.

A playbook definition goes like this: “Growth Loops are systems designed to make every input to generate an output. That output is then reinvested as an input and, since this is a closed-loop system, the process repeats.

In more practical terms, the best-known growth loops are:

🍯 User-2-user referrals

🍯 User-generated content

🍯 Rewards programs

However, offering people €5 to invite a friend for another €5 promo code doesn’t quite cut it in 2022. You may need to find more attractive incentives.

For example, Revolut has upped their referral offering to €50 for every referred friend. On the other hand, they’ve also made it 5x more difficult to fulfill all the conditions.

Test various referral programs to turn one new customer into multiple new customers. By the time the first one leaves, their invitees are referring their own friends. 

The best time to ask for users to refer friends is while they’re excited about your product – either right after signup or after another successful engagement (e.g. ordering something from your store / unlocking a milestone inside the product).

🍩 Build in the initial surprise moment

🍩 Establish growth and retention loops

🍩 Keep people excited and engaged

Once you’ve figured out the biggest hurdles to your company’s growth, you’ll be able to fix the holes in your marketing and product buckets.

It’s only an uphill ride from there.

🍪 Thx for listening, thx for reading! If you’ve got an article/keynote topic you’d like me to cover next, drop me a line on LinkedIn.

—

A quick note: 

I am back from my writing sabbatical and taking on new marketing consultation projects. 

While my schedule for the upcoming months is already 60% booked with confirmed projects, I am still open to 1-2 extra interesting projects starting from October/November 2022. 

Reach out at marketing@karolakarlson.com and tell me how I could help your marketing/growth team.

The post Top 5 Mistakes & Cures of Slow-growth Companies  appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

Cool. I’ve been doing that a lot recently, too.

That’s because video ads have become an indisputable requirement for any Facebook advertising campaign.

When researching Facebook Ad Library for good examples, I noticed that 80% of the TOP brands’  Facebook ad creatives were videos.

Facebook video ads have become a necessity in 2025. You can’t go on running static ads only.

Read more about social media advertising trends in 2025.

Fun fact: Facebook algorithms deliver static and video ads to different audiences, depending on what a user is more likely to react to. So if you want to reach the people more susceptible to video content, you’ll need attractive video creatives.👀

The #1 obstacle that marketers come across when creating video ads for their Facebook or Instagram campaigns is the lack of skill and know-how.

For additional inspiration, you or check out what we’ve published on this blog – including 180 Best Facebook ad examples and 84 Best Instagram ad examples.

Meta video ad best practices

Before I created my first video ads, I had a number of questions:

• What are Facebook video ads’ best practices?
• How long should the ad videos be and what’s the correct size of Facebook video ads?
• What should the Facebook video ads feature?
• What tools are used to create video ads?
• Do we need an agency to create the ad videos for us?

I’ll do my best to answer all of these questions for you in this article.

Let’s not drag this intro too long and get to the Facebook video ad examples!

Best Facebook video ad examples,  2025 update

I found the following video ads while browsing the Facebook Ad Library – I like to regularly check my selected 100 brands’ ad creatives to keep my creative know-how up to date.

#1: Oreo

I envy whoever produced this video ad for Oreo as it’s perfectly executed, having a high-quality sleek look, fast-paced movement, and eye-capturing shifting patterns.

#2: Deliveroo

Deliveroo is running tens of similar Facebook ads, each featuring various city districts and relevant restaurants. Such automatically customized ads are usually created with a creative automation tool, e.g. Smartly. 

​#3: Spotify

Similarly to the previous ad, this Spotify looks a lot like it’s created using an automated Facebook video duplication tool.

Be it as it may, they have managed to create an engaging Facebook video ad with very few resources: An album cover, mixed colorful elements, and on-point typography.

#4: Restream

Working with Restream, we created a set of Facebook video ads that are essentially an animated version of their static ads. 

Bringing your static ads to life is a good way to get started with video advertising on Facebook. You just need a motion designer who can help to make your existing design assets move.

#5: Airbnb

The first four ads that you saw were all around 15 seconds long or even shorter. In contrast, this one by Airbnb is a brand awareness ad: it runs for 40 seconds and tells an inspiring story.

It is a best practice to use a mix of performance-oriented and brand awareness ads. Both need a slightly different approach:

• Performance ads should direct the viewer to make a purchase or take some other action. These ads usually end with a clear call-to-action.
• Brand awareness ads’ goal is to create… well… awareness about a brand and drive positive brand perception. These ads do not usually ask people to take an action immediately.

#6: Milka

Pardon my French. This ad by Milka is essentially reminding people to be nicer to each other. A simple and on-brand Facebook video ad.

#7: Sephora

This ad looks like it took a lot of work, so it is likely to be part of a big global Facebook campaign. 

You can create a mix of Facebook ads – some that take less time to create and that you run in the short-term + the branding ads that you invest more time and money into and will run for a longer period, e.g. for 3 months. 

#8: Klarna

I am a big fan of Facebook ad creatives that follow closely the brand’s CVI. That’s why I’ve always liked Klarna’s ads – they stay true to their pink color palette and as a result, their ads are easily recognizable in the news feed.

# 9: Snickers

Take notice of how this Facebook ad is pairing filmed video content with colorful background and typography.

By using highly contrasting sections throughout your Facebook video ad, you can assure that it will capture your audience’s attention while they scroll through their Instagram or Facebook feeds.  

#10 Moo

One more Facebook video ad effect to test out is the “endless loop” technique.

Repeating motion effects are especially helpful if you have interesting video content that lasts only a few seconds. To make sure your ad gets shows for the full 15-second story ad length, make it repeat on a loop for 15 sec.

#11: Nars

#12: Mailchimp

#13: Dior

#14: Grammarly

#15:Wrike

Facebook video ad examples, 2020 edition

Below, you will find the Meta ad examples that I collected for the previous release of this article. 

Looking at some of them made me think that we’ve come a long way from the time when only a few brands were able to produce high-quality video content.

I should probably start to learn video editing…

#16: VSCO

The Instagram video ad by VSCO showcases their product features in a simplified 15-second video. Here are some key takeaways for you to consider:

• The first 3 seconds matter most – Notice how the first few frames are using a bright color to lead people’s attention to the the ad copy “transformative tools” and get them hooked to watch the rest of the video.
• Video ads ≠ no copy – In fact, it’s a good idea to keep copy in your ad video to better explain what’s going on.

#17: Facebook

Yeah, Facebook is advertising on their own platform and they’re pretty good at it. Here’s what they’re doing well:

• The ad asks a question – there’s a highly visible question always visible in the ad video that catches the viewers’ attention.
• Video & message match – Notice how the message “Need a push?” matches with the moving car’s message.
• Simplicity – a video ad does not have to be 30-seconds long and take days to create. You can start testing with simple animations that are simple yet catch people’s attention.

#18: Monese

Monese’s video ad explains how their product works and shows their app in action. Here’s what’s noteworthy about this ad:

• Display your product – on the one hand, you won’t need as much new content. On the other hand, people will get familiar with how your product looks and feels. It’s a win-win.
• End with a call-to-action – don’t leave people hanging after watching your video. Tell them what’s the next step to take. In this case, it’s “download the app.”

#19: Squarespace

This Instagram video ad by Squarespace is another nice example of simple video design in action:

• Show small changes – showing small changes such as the growing numbers’ count in this ad is a good trick for catching the viewers’ attention.
• Show you logo – It’s a commonly known best practice to show your logo throughout the video ad (that’s also a suggestion in Youtube’s video ads’ playbook)

#20: Nike

If you’re working with a lifestyle or eCommerce brand, your audience might appreciate more story-focused ads. Nike’s ad would make for a great branding video.

• Make it look high quality – if you plan to film your Facebook video ads, make sure you’re using a high end camera.
• Mix video footage & copy – seriously, having some copy in your video ads makes them a lot more comprehensible and having a powerful impact on the audience.

#21: Web Summit

Here’s another example of a story-specific ad, showing how a conference venue is being set up in the matter of hours (being compressed into a 30-second video).

• Tell a story – our brains are hardwired to look for patterns and follow stories, leading your audience being hooked to your video ad
• You don’t need a fancy agency – Web Summit’s video ad could easily have been recorded by a camera set up by a crew member and edited by another crew member. Easy.

#22: AppSumo

This ad is not really a video ad but a Slideshow consisting of AppSumo’s product reviews. Here’s what I like about it:

• Creating it took 5 minutes max – you can create a similar ad by uploading 3-5 images to Facebook and creating a Slideshow ad.
• Showcase testimonials – third-party testimonials increase trust in your product. This ad could be shown in a Facebook retargeting campaign to nudge people to make a purchase.

#23: Mango

Mango’s Facebook ad is like a tiny movie that combines nice views, a celebrity model and the brand’s products.

• Use video ads for branding – while this ad doesn’t invite you to buy any specific product, it reminds you about the brand.
• Work with influencers – if you’ve got enough cash, having an influencer (that’s loved by your target audience) in your ad videos doesn’t hurt.

#24: Reedeshop

• Animate simple messages – even making a word blink or change color can help increase your ad’s click-through rate.
• Use the right ad formats – when creating video ads for Facebook and Instagram, you can upload ads in multiple sizes. Check out all the current Instagram ad specs here.

#25: The New York Times

This is one of my all-time favourite video ads. Seriously, I think it’s genius.

• Create unique ads – The NYT video ad is unique in that it only uses text to tell a story, But it’s super catchy at that.
• Know your tools – I created a similar video ad for a client by using Photoshop only (creating video ads is easier than you think).

The top 10 Facebook and Instagram video ad examples were my favourites. Up next, you will find more video ads for even more inspiration.

But before you check out the rest, here’s a list of tools that you can use to create video ads:

• Photoshop for GIFs + Illustrator to create icons, etc.
• Sketch + Flinto/Kite
• Adobe After Effects
• Record videos on your own
• Buy video footage on Stocksy or other stock photo sites

#26: BeUnsettled

BeUnsettled’s video ad is quote basic in terms of video content. However, they’ve combined video footage that looks like stock videos with copy, giving it more substance.

The nature-movie-like frames also fit perfectly into anyone’s Instagram feed, which can be a good or bad thing, depending on whether the ad manages to catch the target audience’s attention.

#27: Pelacase

This is another example of a Facebook video ad using average video footage, but using the correct medium to tell the story.

#28: Facebook

Here’s a good Facebook video ad example for marketers with small budgets that want to test our some kind of video animation.

You could basically take a static image and pair it with an animated loading icon – you’re guaranteed to get people look and wait for your ad video to load, without this ever happening. But then again, you’ve already got their attention, so they might as well read the rest of your ad.

#29: Okia

Playing around with text is the easiest way to create video ads. You could do a similar video on Photoshop in around 10 minutes. (+ the hours you’ll spend to come up with a good message and unique value proposition ideas for your ad).

#30: BetterMe

If you saw this ad as a static image v.s. a GIF ad, which one would catch your attention?

Try turning some of your existing static Facebook ad designs into GIFs to find out if it helps to increase the CTR and lower the cost-per-result.

#31: MyTheresa

Here’s an example of an Instagram ad that probably required a high budget to create. This is definitely appealing to a lot of luxury goods buyers.

However, spending tens of thousands of dollars on video creation does not always mean your ad is 10 times more efficient. Make sure to think who your target audience is before buying a video from an agency.

#32: Stuudionahk

For a leather goods brand like this one, creating a video ad to showcase their products makes a lot of sense. However, I would always suggest that you pair your video ads with image ads to see what works best.

#33: DRM Bracelets

This is a completely random campaign by some drop shipping brand. But I have to give it to them – using the country name in the ad is a nice personalised touch.

#34: Trvl

Notice how this Instagram video ad example by Trvl combines images, copy and colorful backgrounds to create a video-like effect. In fact, there’s no video footage in this ad – another proof that you don’t need a large budget to create marketing videos.

#35: Monese

I’ve always been a fan of slightly animated video ads (we also test a lot of them in Taxify). The reason these animations work is that they catch people’s attention but don’t lead the focus away from the ad’s main message.

Alright… We’ve reached the end of our video ad showdown.

Here are some key takeaways to remember:

• You need to test video ads – there are brands whose audiences love video ads. But there are also Facebook and Instagram advertising campaigns where image ads work best.
• Creating video ads doesn’t have to be expensive – many of the examples above could have been made in just a few hours. With help from one of the many great unlimited video editing companies, you can keep production fast and affordable. Expenses do not equal results in the case of Facebook ads.
• There are many video ad hacks – from catching the attention in the first 3 seconds to ending the video with a clear call-to-action, there’s a lot you can do to double or even triple your video ads’ conversion rate.

P.S. if you’ve got some cool Facebook or Instagram video ad examples, send them over and we’re happy to include them in this list.

The post 35 Facebook Video Ad Examples – 2025 Update appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

You could either…

1. Create a personal Instagram account and start seeing ads
2. Browse online ad galleries
3. Read this article with 80+ Instagram ad examples

While browsing various ad examples, you will eventually reach another question: What makes the best Instagram ads so good?

There are several aspects:

1. Your Instagram ad design must catch the viewer’s eyes.
2. It’s best to follow Instagram ad size and specs best practices and create ads with the size of 1080×1080 px.
3. Create a different ad for your Facebook and Instagram campaign (1200×628 px vs. 1080×1080 px).
4. You must find a strong unique value proposition (USP).

As marketing legend David Ogilvy put it:

“If your advertising fails to get the message to the heads of people, your money’s wasted. And this is happening to millions of advertisers every day.”

So how can you create Instagram ads that won’t fail? – Check out the 84 ad examples in this article to get tens of new ideas for creating irresistible Instagram ads that will increase your sales.

How to use this article:

The first 10 ad examples come with an explanation of what makes them work – so that you can get a better overview of Instagram ad best practices.

While browsing all these examples, analyze:

• What makes the ad’s design good?
• What copywriting hacks could you copy?
• How to apply these best practices to your campaigns?

If you’re in B2B business, you might want to check out these 100+ LinkedIn ad examples by fast-growth brands.

Ok? Let’s roll!

#1: The Economist

What makes this ad good?

The Economist’s Instagram ad example showcases their magazine covers, letting the viewer immediately know what the product is. But instead of just showing the image, they have used ½ of the ad space to include a headline and a pricing point, making the ad more informative.

Key takeaways:

• Showcase your product – people will immediately grasp what it is that you’re selling.
• Add copy in your ad image – Consumer Acquisition found that images are responsible for 75%-90% of ad performance. It makes sense to add your USP in the image.
• Don’t make your ad too text-heavy

#2: HubSpot

What makes this ad good?

HubSpot’s Facebook ad is super simple – You could create it in under 1 minute by using Paint or Photoshop. However, the bright colours and copy will catch many people’s attention in the Instagram newsfeed. Think about it – the newsfeed is full of photos. This makes this ad example with simple background shine out.

Key takeaways:

• Use bright colours – People’s brains are wired to notice bright colours and associate them with positive feelings.
• Use simple ad design – In the crowded Instagram newsfeed, simplicity is often the key. Test ads that include only background + copy.
• Use the correct ad size – We can’t help but wonder how much more efficient this ad would be when created as a square image… It would take up more space in the newsfeed, and draw even more attention.

#3: New York Times

What makes this ad good?

This NYT Instagram ad is similar to the previous example in that it features a monochrome background with copy. However, this ad has taken a couple of steps further, playing with typography and including the brand’s logo. Also, the ad size is 1080×1080 px, which is perfect for Instagram ads.

Key takeaways:

• Use interesting typography – If you’re planning to include a lot of copy in your ad image, use eye-catching fonts to bring your ad to life.
• Include your logo in the ad image – It will help to create higher brand awareness at no extra cost. Moreover, your logo can serve as a design element.
• Use contrasting font colours – When using the background + copy ad design hack, make sure your background colour and font colours contrast each other. Otherwise, it will be difficult to read your ad’s copy.

#4: MeetFrank

What makes this ad good?

MeetFrank’s Instagram ad example uses a simple custom design which is highly efficient when it comes to Facebook and Instagram advertising. Moreover, the ad design features a growth curve which immediately draws the viewer’s attention. Not to mention showcasing numbers – another element that’s guaranteed to get more eyes on your Instagram ad.

Key takeaways:

• Use symbols in your ad design – Including positive symbols such as a growth curve in your ad design will make your audience remember you with positive emotions.
• Include numbers in your ad design – Research shows that by starting your headline with a number, you’re 36% more likely to have people click on your ads. Numbers draw attention.
• Address your users in the ad – By asking “UI/UX DEsigner” in the image, MeetFrank’s ad gets the attention of everyone who feels themselves addressed.

#5: Rains

What makes this ad good?

Being an apparel brand, it’s increasingly important for Rains to show their product in the best light. To showcase their products, Rains has created an Instagram carousel ad that features 3 different images (notice the three blue dots under the ad image). Moreover, the ad image’s size is in an interesting format, resembling a portrait photo rather than square image.

Key takeaways:

• Create Instagram carousel ads – Include more than one image in your ad to show multiple products within a single ad.
• Use professional photographs – If you’re planning to advertise a photo ad image, make sure these look professional. You can hire a photographer to help you out.
• Test portrait images – Instagram allows advertisers to set up ad images in portrait formats. Use this option to take up more space in the newsfeed.

#6: Zaful

What makes this ad good?

This Instagram ad example by Zaful caught our eye due to the original way of dividing the ad image into several pictures, creating a mosaic effect. That’s a smart idea to showcase different sides/elements of your product in a single ad image. You can also use it as a Facebook advertising hack.

Key takeaways:

• Test mosaic images – If you want to show multiple aspects of your product, test dividing your ad image into multiple image blocks.
• Combine mosaics with carousel ads – You could use the mosaic-style image as the first card in your Instagram carousel ad, and then include each mosaic image in a closeup as individual carousel ad images.
• Use hashtags – Instagram is all about hashtags. Did you notice the #FreeShipping hashtag in the ad text? Using hashtags will make your ad feel more like it belongs on Instagram.

#6: The Dots

What makes this ad good?

The Dots’ Instagram ad combines a colourful background image with in-image value proposition. While the in-image copy is a little bit difficult to read due to low contrast, it looks sleek and in balance with other ad elements.

Key takeaways:

• If you use stock photos, use good ones – Sometimes, it pays off to use a stock photo in your Instagram ads. However, do not include an overused free stock photo. Make sure people haven’t seen your ad image before.
• Mention your customers – Listing your well-know business customers’ names in the ad copy helps to increase trust in your brand. Note that this tactic requires the approval from your clients.
• Select the right call-to-action – Instagram allows you to select between several CTAs. Use the call-to-action that’s closest to your goal (if you want people to buy something, use the “Shop Now” CTA, etc.)

#7: The Kooples

What makes this ad good?

Here’s another Instagram ad example featuring apparel. Notice how the photographs have been taken by a professional photographer, showing the clothes in good light. Moreover, the ad copy lets the viewer know that there’s a SALE going on, increasing the ad’s click-through rate.

Key takeaways:

• Use emojis – Include emojis in your ad copy to make your ads more interesting. Read how to use emojis in your Facebook ads.
• Add up to 10 carousel cards – Do not limit yourself to 2-3 carousel ad cards – you can add up to 10.
• Add a different link to each image – When setting up your carousel ads, you can make each image to direct to a different link. Use this option to direct people to the correct product’s landing page.

#8: 8fit

What makes this ad good?

8fit’s Instagram ad image looks like it’s taken directly from a health blogger’s Instagram page. That’s the key to their potential audience’s hearts. If you’re advertising a lifestyle brand, use images that showcase your product in normal settings, so that people can imagine themselves using it.

Key takeaways:

• Copy successful Instagram accounts – No, we’re not suggesting that you copy their posts one-to-one. That would be plagiarism. But do copy them in terms of style.
• Write actionable ad copy – Use words like “Use,” “Get,” “Start,” etc. to indicate that people are supposed to take action on your Instagram ad.

#9: MindTitan

What makes this ad good?

This Instagram ad example by MindTitan is not here to sell – it’s focused on attracting talent and getting them to join the company. Instagram is a great platform for advertising your job offers – an opportunity that’s often overlooked by companies. Moreover, the ad states a question in the ad image, nudging people’s minds to answer “Yes” or “No,” and getting them engaged in the first few seconds.

Key takeaways:

• Test Instagram ads for hiring – In addition to promoting your product on Instagram, you can use it to reach talented people.
• Ask a question in the ad image – This will get more people hooked to your Instagram ad, and they will also read the rest of your ad copy.
• Use branded ad design – If you want your ads to be associated with your brand, it’s a good idea to create Instagram ad images that use your branded colours and design elements.

#10: Facebook Audience Network

What makes this ad good?

Instead of trying to sell you anything, this Instagram ad starts with a content marketing offer – an informative article. Facebook Audience Network is using the Instagram ad to keep their customers – marketers – informed about the upcoming features and changes.

Key takeaways:

• Use Instagram ads for promoting content – Especially in B2B sales, it’s important to start with a soft sell, and slowly turn your leads into paying customers.
• Mix icons and symbols – An easy way to create a custom Instagram ad design is to download some free icons and symbols and use Illustrator or Photoshop to mix them together into a good-looking ad image.

If you want to learn more about Instagram advertising, check out this in-depth guide: Instagram Advertising – Always Up-to-date Guide (2018 Edition)

#11: UsabilityHub

#12: Airbnb

#13: Blinkist

#14: Poketo

#15: Brooklinen

#16: Foreo

#17: Cofounders Lab

#18: Squarespace

#19: Deloitte Baltics

#20: The Dots

#21: Kickstarter

#22: Facebook Marketing Developers

#23: Workplace by Facebook

#24: Ohheygirl Store

#25: Folsom & Co

#26: Freefly Systems

#27: Getdesignrr

#28: Gurushots

#29: Harvard Business Review

#30: Hisuperhi

#31: H&M

#32: Hyatt

#33: Inch2

#34: Jason Squire smm

#35: Jon Loomer

#36: British Journal of Photography

#37: Aceroix

#38: Architonicag

#39: Asanarebel

#40: Alex la Rigato

#41: Udemy

#42: Alexander Wang NY

#43: Azalea’s Boutique

#44: LIFT99

#45: Makery

#46: Masterclass

#47: Flachsmann Watches

#48: Gagosian Gallery

#49: Nortal

#50: Nosto

#51: Olive Clothing

#52: Onelive

#53: Cbyloredanapinasco

#54: Origin

#55: Out in London

#56: Paradise Amsterdam

#57: Parts of 4

#58: Pelacase

#59: Pexel Photos

#60:Black Mirror Fans

#61: Rains

#62: Reserved

#63: Rise of the Kings

#64: Scoro

#65: Frontrow

#66: Shopify

#67: STAC

#68: Stitch and Story

#69: Studio Living

#70: Bold Tuesday

#71: Sugar and Cotton

#73: Taxify

#74: Tentree

#75: The Horse

#76: Trvl

#77: Two Dots

#78: Udemy

#79: Venngage

#80: Vidcon

#81: Mvmforher

#82: Web Summit

#83: Wizzair

#84: Your Plug Clothing

Conclusion

Now that you’ve quickly scrolled through all the Instagram ad examples in this article, you definitely have some great new ideas.

If you want to learn even more about creating efficient Facebook and Instagram ads, check out this guide: 215+ Best Facebook Ad Examples (2025 Update)

The post 80+ Best Instagram Ad Examples (2025 update) appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

Many of the Facebook ad audits I’ve done happened during a 1h AMA (Ask Me Anything) call. This means that we managed to discuss all other marketing-related questions and do a quick audit. 

In smaller accounts, Facebook ad campaigns audit can be done fast, almost at a glance – in 15-30 minutes.

How? How to audit a Meta advertising account? What to check? How will you know what to improve?

This article will give you some pointers on how to conduct a Facebook ad audit. Bookmark it for later or open up your Facebook Ads Manager right away to follow along and audit your ads in 15-30 minutes.

Take a quick crash course in Facebook analytics by learning about these 15 Facebook ad metrics.

10 questions for Facebook ad audit:

Here’s a quick overview of the 10 questions that I always ask/check/review when auditing a Facebook advertising account. They’re based on my 5+ years of Facebook ads management experience and what I’ve seen working.

Ad campaign level:

1. Are the ad campaigns set up with the correct structure?
2. Does the ad account have remarketing and re-engagement campaigns?

Ad set level:

3. Are all ad sets optimized on correct goals? Is Facebook Pixel set up?
4. Do all ad sets collect enough conversions for algorithms to learn?
5. Which target audiences are being used? Are they optimal?
6. Does the account use Lookalike audiences and Custom audiences?

Ad level:

7. Are there static ads in all correct sizes?
8. Do your Facebook ads look overall attractive?
9. Do your video ads follow all of the best practices?
10. Is your ads’ post-click experience converting?

One of the questions – Do the ads look attractive? – can sound subjective. We’ll take a look at some 👍 v.s. 👎 examples to clarify what works and what doesn’t.

As you read further, I suggest that you open up your Facebook Ads Manager and follow along as we walk through each point. I wrote this guide with specifically small businesses and non-marketers in mind, and will try to share as much guidance as possible – so that even a person who hasn’t opened the Facebook Ads Manager once in their life can navigate through.

Ready to audit? 🕵️ If you don’t know how to access your Facebook Ads Manager, try this link: Open your Facebook Ads Manager.

You should land in a view that shows all your company’s ad campaigns. If you’re added to multiple Facebook ad accounts, you can navigate between them using the dropdown menu. 

Alternatively, if you don’t find your company’s ad account, you can ask your in-house marketer or agency to give you the access – it is possible that you’re not currently allowed to access the advertising account.

In case you made it, you should now see your company’s Facebook ad account. Let’s begin with the audit!

1. Are the campaigns set up with the correct structure?

The first thing that I always check during a Facebook ad audit is the campaign structure:

• Does the ad account have an optimal number of campaigns?
• Are the campaigns set up using the correct objectives and campaign types?
• Are the campaigns set up to run long-term or are they often paused and replaced with new campaigns?

The main mistake that I usually see is that the companies have too many or too few ad campaigns. 

A good amount is one prospecting, one remarketing, and one re-engagement campaign per country (or per region/globally if you work with small budgets).

Also, many companies make the mistake of launching a new ad campaign every time they change their ad creatives or launch a new marketing campaign. 

You should rather always keep on the same campaigns and ad sets (just change the ad creatives inside them), so that Facebook algorithms learn based on accumulating conversions.

I’m not going to get too much into detail, but I’ve written extensively on Facebook ad structure best practices before, so check out that article if you want to learn more. 

Just to quickly illustrate a good example: here’s the general Facebook prospecting campaign structure that I always use with my clients.

• There is one campaign with two ad sets: one with a broad audience and another with 1% or 5% Lookalike audience.
• Both ad sets have the exact same ad creatives inside them.
• Sometimes, I also add ad sets with special interest-based audiences (if I want to show these audiences different more targeted ad creatives).

Here are the top 3 questions to answer when reviewing your account on ad campaign level:

1. Do you have separate ad campaigns for different countries? – YES is correct, you should have separate campaigns for markets with different income levels.
2. Have you launched a new ad campaign for every new marketing campaign? – NO is correct, you should reuse old campaigns whenever possible.
3. Do your ad campaigns have less than 3 active ad sets per campaign? YES is correct, it is better to have fewer ad sets, especially if you’re working with small budgets.

P.S. Here’s something interesting that I learned over the past 12 months: Most of the recommendations I was given by Facebook’s official account managers (all big advertisers get a special support person from Facebook) to improve my clients’ Facebook ad accounts led to worse results v.s. what we were already doing with my clients. So maybe, even if your agency is telling you that “we do it like this because it is the best practice,” ask them to at least A/B test your other hypotheses too.

2. Does the ad account have remarketing and re-engagement campaigns?

Remarketing campaigns are a must-have for any brand, especially for any B2C company with an online store.

It is such a given that I wouldn’t even think about including it under the 10 points of this auditing guide if I hadn’t seen many ad accounts with no remarketing.

So… Are you running remarketing campaigns to reach past website visitors, landing page & blog viewers, last-minute shopping cart abandoners, repeat purchasers?

If you can’t see any remarketing happening on your Facebook ad account, ask your agency or ad specialist what’s up.

Another thing to review is how much are you spending on remarketing and is the budget split optimal? Learn more about seasonal marketing planning and budgeting.

With the brands that I’m working with, we usually spend ca 20-30% of the total advertising budget on remarketing.

Here’s the full-funnel breakdown:

• Prospecting campaigns: 60-80%
• Remarketing campaigns: 20-30%
• Brand awareness campaigns (optional, I usually mix these with prospecting): 0-10%
• Re-engagement campaigns (optional, I recommend to use these): 0-10%

The re-engagement campaigns target people who were active customers in the past, but haven’t used your product (or purchased from your store) for a while. If you want to reach those users via Facebook ads, make sure that these campaigns are set up as well. 

In this phase of your audit, ask these questions:

1. Do you have remarketing and re-engagement ad campaigns set up and actively delivering? – The answer, of course, should be YES.
2. Are the remarketing ad campaigns reaching all the correct audiences? Are some audiences left out of remarketing? Are you targeting web visitors, shopping cart abandoners, past purchasers, etc.?
3. Are your remarketing and re-engagement campaigns spending the optimal part of your total budget? It should be around 20-30% of the total spend.

3. Are the ad sets optimized on the correct goals? Is Facebook Pixel set up?

Assuming that the Facebook ad account that we’re auditing has both prospecting and remarketing campaigns set up, we can move on to the ad set level and continue the investigation.

To navigate to the ad set level, either click on a campaign (blue markup) or tick the box before a campaign and select “Ad Sets for 1 Campaign” in the navigation bar (red markup).

You will end up seeing all the ad sets under that specific ad campaign. To see how each ad set is set up, click on the tiny “Edit” text under its name.

Click on “Edit” to see how each ad set is structured

On the ad set level, you will be able to see who is the target audience + how the ad delivery is optimized.

Right now, we’re interested in making sure that your ad delivery is optimized on conversions (instead of Clicks or Impressions).

Scroll down in the editing popup window until you reach the “Optimization & Delivery” section. Make sure that you see “Conversions” here.

There are a few cases where ad sets do not need to be optimized on conversions. For example, if your campaign’s goal is to reach the maximum number of people.

However, if your ad campaign’s goal is to drive sales and bring you new customers (which is true for 95% of advertisers), your ad campaigns (and ad sets) should be optimized on those purchase events.

Another quick way to review all your ad sets’ optimization goals is to check what is counted as a result in the Results column.

Ideally, you should see down-the-funnel events here (such as purchases and registrations).

If your ad sets are not optimized on those events, there are two possible reasons for this:

• It is actually smarter to optimize on top-of-the-funnel goals like clicks or impressions as you only want to raise brand awareness instead of increasing sales.
• You don’t have the Facebook Pixel set up and you’re unable to optimize on Purchase or Registration events because Facebook isn’t tracking them.

Is Facebook Pixel tracking all the important conversions?

To make sure that all your important online events are tracked by Facebook, visit the Facebook Events Manager. You can access it under the 9-dot menu icon at the top left corner of your Ads Manager).

If your Pixel isn’t set up at all, you will see something like this. 👇 It means that you yet have to set up Facebook Pixel on your website / online product / mobile app (or all of them).

If your Facebook Pixel is properly set up, you should see a list of all the tracked events and the time when each was last received by Facebook.

Facebook Pixel is correctly set up

I have yet to see a business that wouldn’t benefit from Facebook Pixel setup, This means that you should definitely have your Pixel set up and tracking all the main events. If it’s not doing that, your ad account has a big deficiency.

So, to sum up, here are the 3 questions to ask in this audit stage:

1. Are your ad sets optimized on events such as Purchases or Registrations (v.s. link clicks or reach)? You should be answering this one with a YES.
2. Is Facebook Pixel set up for your advertising account? It better be!
3. Are all your important marketing conversion events being tracked via the Facebook Pixel?

4. Do all ad sets collect enough conversions for algorithms to learn? 

Facebook algorithms have a learning phase – a specific amount of clicks and conversions that are needed for the algorithms to understand who’s the best target audience for you.

Usually, new ad campaigns have worse results (higher cost-per-result) during the learning phase. So it is important that your ads pass the learning phase.

If your ad campaigns never pass the learning phase, you will never reach the full potential of your Facebook ads.

The main mistake I see on the audited Facebook ad accounts is that they have too many campaigns, and none of these reach the end of the learning phase. 

Either the campaign is paused and a new one started or there are simply too many different campaigns with too low budgets.

To check whether your ad campaigns get enough conversions, set the reporting timeframe of the past 30 days. Then review how many results each ad campaign and ad set has collected.

What is a good number of results that a Facebook ad campaign should collect in 30 days? Ideally, each of your ad sets should collect at least 50 conversions over 30 days. Usually, I expect to see even higher numbers.

Is the ad account using a correct attribution window?

Always check what’s the attribution window of your ad account.

The attribution window is the number of days between when a person viewed or clicked your ad and subsequently took an action. Having a different attribution window changes what results you see in your Ads Manager reports.

Facebook tracks conversions both via clicks and ad views:

• Click-through attribution: A person clicked your ad and took an action.
• View-through attribution: A person saw your ad, didn’t click it, but took an action within the attribution window.

By default, each Facebook ad account’s attribution window is set to 1-day view and 28-day click. However, it should usually be changed to 1-day click or 7-day click as you don’t want to give Facebook credit for conversions that actually happened without its help.

You can review your attributtion window under the Ad Account Settings.

Summing it up again, here are the 3 questions to ask in this audit stage:

1. How many results did each campaign and ad set collect in the past 30 days? If it’s lower than 50 results per ad set, you may need to increase your budget or lower the number of separate campaigns and ad sets. 
2. Are the ad campaigns turned off and new ones added frequently? That’s not good, reuse old campaigns whenever possible.
3. Are you using the optimal attribution window? E.g. 28-day click-through window is usually way too long and Facebook will attribute to ads the conversions that actually happened via other channels.

5. Which target audiences are being targeted? Are they broad enough?

The success of your Facebook ad campaigns largely depends on your target audience. You need to catch the attention of the right people.

As part of your audit, take a look at all of your campaigns’ target audiences.

Assuming that your ad account has both prospecting and remarketing campaigns, we’ll need to review both of them.

Let’s start with prospecting campaigns – the campaigns target a broad audience that haven’t yet heard about your product.

Your Facebook ad campaigns’ targeting is set up on the ad set level. To see which audience each campaign is targeting, navigate to its ad sets and click on the “Edit” icon under each ad set to see who’s targeted.

Here’s a list of the main Facebook ad targeting mistakes that I’ve seen companies making in their prospecting stage campaigns:

👎 Targeting very narrow audiences of fewer than 50,000 people. You want to keep some room for Facebook algorithms to do the optimization for you.

👎 Targeting multiple countries with very different purchasing power or language in the same ad set.

👎 Targeting the same audience in multiple ad campaigns, creating a large-scale audience overlap (we’ll discuss this in greater detail soon).

👎 Not targeting some of the most efficient audiences such as Lookalike audiences of top purchasers.

The last mistake leads us to the next question in our Facebook ads audit…

6. Does the account use Lookalike audiences and Custom audiences?

In addition to interest-based and location-based audiences, Facebook also allows you to create Custom and Lookalike audiences.

Every properly set up Facebook ad account should make use of all three audience types. 

Here’s a quick explanation:

• Custom Audiences let you target existing audiences (people who visited your website, past purchasers, etc.)
• Lookalike Audiences expand your ads’ reach to people who are similar to your existing customers.

Using these two additional audience types helps to reach more relevant audiences and drive up your Return on Ad Spend (ROI).

To review whether your Facebook ad campaigns are targeting Custom and Lookalike audiences, review the ad-set level audience targeting, just like under the previous point.

Also, you should make sure that there is no huge overlap between the audiences targeted in various campaigns. 

Audience overlap makes your campaigns bid against each other and amplify your Facebook ads cost.

How to audit if your Facebook audiences overlap:

1. Check which audiences your live campaigns are targeting
2. Navigate to the Audience Manager and select up to 5 audiences that you suspect might overlap
3. Select the “Show Overlap” 

Usually, Facebook ad accounts using a mix of Saved, Lookalike, and Custom audiences tend to have a higher risk of audience overlap.

If you encounter a high audience overlap, you can either pause one of the competing ad sets or use the “Exclude” feature to exclude an audience from any ad set.

In the example below, we excluded a Lookalike audience from an ad set targeting another Lookalike audience because they overlapped by 60%. And naturally, we don’t want to target people who already purchased, so we also excluded the Custom audience of past 60 days’ purchasers.

To wrap up this stage of our Facebook ad campaign audit, here are the 5 top mistakes to look out for:

1. Missing remarketing audience – You should always target Custom audiences of past website visitors, shopping cart abandoners, etc. with remarketing ads.
2. Missing Lookalike audiences – You should always test out 1% and 2% Lookalike audiences of top purchasers and later try more different options.
3. High audience overlap between ongoing ad campaigns – Make sure that different ad sets’ audiences don’t overlap.
4. Not excluding converted users – You shouldn’t keep showing sales-oriented ads to people who recently purchased or have an ongoing subscription
5. Not testing new audiences – When auditing a Facebook ad account that has been used for a while, it’s easy to see if the marketers are testing new audiences on a regular basis.

Here’s some good news: We’ve more or less covered the technical aspects of your Facebook ads audit and can now move forward to an arguably more engaging part: the visuals.

To view the ad visuals of a specific Facebook or Instagram ad campaign, click on a campaign name, then click on an ad set name, and you can see all the Facebook ads inside that ad campaign. You can see the full visual by clicking the “Edit” icon.

7. Are there static ads in all correct sizes?

In the example above, the ad visual only exists in one size: the landscape format. In our Facebook ad audit, that’s a red flag.

For your Facebook campaigns to perform well across the feed and stories placements, you need to have each one of your ad visuals in all three main formats:

• Newsfeed: 1080 x 1080 pixels
• Stories: 1080 x 1920 pixels
• Landscape: 1200 x 628 pixels

Why do you need three different sizes per ad? Mainly in order for your ads to look great and attractive across the entire Facebook ad network.

As you can see, missing a visual that’s optimized for Instagram Story placement can result in a very ugly ad creative.

This story ad looks fairly ugly.

Regularly, you also shouldn’t leave exclude any of the ad placements. It is a best practice to use automatic placements (this is set up on ad set level) and let Facebook algorithms optimize the best placements for you.

Use the Automatic Placements to scale your campaigns’ reach.

Here’s a more detailed guide on Facebook ad specs and size.

If your ad creatives are set up correctly in all three sizes, you should see different (and good-looking!) ad visuals for feed, story, and instant article placements.

Your feed and story ads should look different.

In my experience, 7/10 of the Facebook ad accounts that I’ve audited did not have all the correct ad sizes for each placement. And in 10/10 of cases the results have improved significantly after we fixed the mistake and added the ad creatives in all correct sizes.

8. Do your Facebook ads look overall attractive?

Based on all the Facebook ad audits that I have done, the most frequent reason for dismal Facebook advertising results are ugly ad creatives.

The most common mistakes include not having text in ad visuals, using stock photos, or design solutions that look like they’re straight outta 2000s.

Such a wasted opportunity and yet such a great opportunity to fix the campaign performance

If your Facebook ads make one of the above-mentioned mistakes, rest assured that it can be quickly fixed with some help from an experienced designer or Facebook marketing expert.

For example, this Meta ad example by Klarna is not painstakingly difficult to create – you just need someone with a good eye + experience in what works on Facebook. 

To better understand how some top brands’ Facebook ads look like, check out the following articles:

• 40 Instagram Story Ad Examples
• New Facebook Ads that Beat the Competition in 2020

9. Do your video ads follow all of the best practices?

Before we make sure your Facebook video ads follow all the best practices, there is one even more urgent question:

Do you even have any video ads in your ad campaigns?

Truth is, video ads aren’t always the best-performing ad creatives. But every advertiser should at least test videos to see how well they work.

Here’s rule number one of this Facebook advertising audit stage: Your Facebook ad campaigns should have either live or paused video ads.

If they’re paused, there’s a good reason to assume that they just weren’t performing too well.

Rule number two? Your video ads should follow these best practices:

• Clearly showcase your product.
• Be short (15s maximum) and immediately engaging.
• Feature written text and your brand’s logo.

Here’s a nice example by TransferWise: Their video ad is eye-catching, explains the product’s benefits, and doesn’t drag along for too long.

Your video ads do not have to be complex in order to work. They just have to be optimized for being shown on Facebook and Instagram.

Using TV-ad like videos usually doesn’t work because the videos are too long and slow. 

Rather, you should use flashy colorful video ads. Such ads can be created as a simple combination of animated image content and colorful text captions. Like the Delliveroo ad below…

When conducting a Facebook advertising audit, I usually evaluate video ads based on my gut feeling which comes from having seen videos that worked and didn’t work.

Not to lose hope! If you haven’t seen many Facebook ads before, a good way to understand if your ad creatives are good is to compare them against your competitors’ ads. 😉

To see the Facebook ads that your competitors are running, go to the Facebook Ad Library and type in your competitors’ brand name. Et voila! You can see a selection of their active Facebook ads. How do your ad visuals compare to what you see?

If your ad account is missing video creatives, give them a try. Or if you see that your current video ads more or less suck, create new ones that look better.

To learn more about creating highly effective video ads, check out how brands like Bolt, Spotify, Netflix, Starbucks, and Klarna are doing them. Or view the collection of 21 Facebook Video Ad Examples.

10. Is your ads’ post-click experience converting?

Sometimes, the reason for low Facebook ad results is not a poorly set up ad campaign or ad visuals. The problem might also hide in the post-click experience ( your website or App Store listing).

I’ve come across several cases where a company’s Facebook ads looked great and had a high click-through rate. However, there weren’t that many Purchase conversions. In a number of such cases, the problem laid either in a bad post-click experience or a mismatch between the messaging in the Facebook ads v.s. their landing page.

To see where your Facebook ads are leading people after they click, review the URLs in your ad-level setup.

Landing pages are an important gateway between your paid ad creatives and product. And the messaging + style of your Facebook ads should match with what your potential customer will see on the landing page.

For example, you don’t want to promise people a 50% discount and then take them to a landing page with no information about the discount. Or you don’t want to advertise a mobile app that provides Instagram filters and then take people to a website that promotes a product for Instagram Business account management.

Here are a few more questions for auditing your Facebook ad landing page:

1. Is your post-click experience simple and clear? You want the user to stay focused on your offer and not get too carried away.
2. Does your landing page mention a clear next step? – Is there a call-to-action on the landing page (e.g. “sign up” or “add to cart”)?
3. Is your promoted product visible on your landing page? People want to see what they’re buying, especially if they already saw it in your Facebook ads.

For example, this landing page by Doordash is in many ways the perfect ad landing page: it’s brief, the design aligns with Doordash’s’ CVI, the text mentions a clear benefit, and it is obvious that the next step would be to sign up.

Efficient landing pages are usually short.

P.S. If it looks like your Facebook ads and website pages look completely off, it is sometimes easier to start from scratch and redo both of them, so that you’ll get new better-looking ads together with a matching landing page that converts more visitors.

—

Alright, that’s it! Hope we managed to beat the 30 minute mark. If you found out that your Facebook ad account is not 100% perfectly set up, don’t feel down – look at it as an opportunity to improve your results.

If you have any comments or questions about the Facebook ad audit, reach out via LinkedIn.

The post 30min DYI Facebook Ad Account Audit appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

I’d worked with them before, but coming in after a year, it all looked like a big mess to start untangling.

There were some ongoing marketing partnership deals, ad campaigns that had developed over the years, different brand messages used across marketing channels…

Basically, A LOT to grasp, review, fix or build up. 🔥

I mean… That’s how it always feels when joining a team with ongoing processes. And this is fine.

Regular “starting to work with a new brand” situation

However, after 3-4 weeks of an intense period of meetings and documenting the new strategy, things finally seem to be falling in place: we’ve got the fully new Facebook ads strategy live and running, we’re publishing blog articles (again), and the B2B leads’ number is shooting up.

I figured it would be interesting to write about how joining a new company as a CMO looks from the inside and what are the first things to work on.

How does it feel? Where to get started? What to prioritize? What mistakes to avoid?

I hope this will be helpful for all the new (and not new) marketing team leads out there.

Week 1: Understanding the big picture + meeting the team

The first thing I ALWAYS do when taking on a new client or joining a new company is to meet the team and understand how they see things.

I started by meeting with both the management team + all marketing team members to ask them a list of questions.

You just can’t review/create a marketing strategy without knowing the company’s high-level goals.

The top-down planning goes like this – Image source

Some of the things I asked the management team:

• What are the top-level KPIs you want to reach in the next 3, 6, 12 months? Why?
• What’s in the product plans for the next 3, 6, 12 months? Why?
• What’s currently the biggest revenue-driver? Where’s the bottleneck? Why?
• What do you think the marketing team can help the most with? Why?

Asking “Why” as a follow-up to each question helps to better understand the logic behind.

E.g. by asking “Why do you want to grow the GMV over expanding the marketplace” I can either understand that the company needs to grow their revenue to land the next investment round, or we discover that revenue doesn’t matter and we need to 10x the size of the marketplace.

Also, it’s surprising how many CEOs can’t answer the question about the company’s high-level KPIs and long-term plans. Not the case with MeetFrank. Anyhow, I really recommend asking the above questions even before accepting a marketing job in a company.

So basically, instead of jumping to the projects right away, start by understanding the mission, objectives, KPIs, etc.

Mission ➟ strategy ➟ objectives ➟➟➟ Projects Image source

By being aware of the top-level KPIs and objectives, I’d be able to come up with the best marketing strategy to help achieve those.

Knowing the management team’s vision, I took a step closer to the action and met up with each marketing team member individually.

Some of the things I asked each of the marketing team members:

• Who’s in the Marketing team and what are their owned projects?
• What are the Marketing team’s KPIs and OKRs?
• How do you document things? How do you track MoM results? What charts and tracking tools do they check?
• Where are the B2C and B2B users coming from right now?
• What user acquisition tactics have you tested before?
• Who’s the typical user? What value do they get from using the product?
• Who’s the typical B2B client? What value do they get from using the product?
• What are the biggest challenges and blockers?
• Where could I help the most?

My personal goal for these meetings was to understand what’s working, whether the team understands what they’re doing, and how are the inter-team relationships.

I also wanted to understand how marketing results are tracked and measured, what are some of the things that were tried but didn’t work, and much much more.

MeetFrank recently did a CVI rebranding

In addition to meeting the team, I also did research on my own, reviewing the website, social media accounts, and ad accounts. 🕵️‍♀️

Most importantly, I user tested the product, both on B2C and B2B side. You can’t do marketing for a product that you haven’t tried out yourself.

As a result, I had many notebook pages’ worth of notes and felt even more overflown with information and ideas what to work on next.

Me telling Kaarel, the CEO, about all the ideas

At least I felt closer to untangling the mess in my head.

After 10 meetings, I had more or less the information I needed to start outlining the macro-level marketing strategy. In the case of MeetFrank, it felt easier to build the strategy from scratch than to adjust the existing one.

Above all, it meant creating a ton of new spreadsheets and guides. 🐿️ 🤓

Week 2: Creating tons of reports & documents

People have different styles of leadership.

I personally love to have a clear structure with spreadsheets and guidelines in place, so that everyone has a quick overview of their priorities, tasks, and results. It just makes me feel more on top of things and less messy. #tidy

Here are some of the spreadsheets and documents we created:

• Marketing team masterplan with KPI tracking
• Marketing team Q1 2020 roadmap
• Content marketing planning sheet
• Social media planning sheet
• Online ads strategy + creatives

On top of that, I wrote some Confluence guides on more specific topics, e.g. how our Facebook ad campaigns should be set up or what types of social media posts we publish.

Basically, I just wanted to get things moving fast, have everyone know their responsibilities + priorities, and create an overview for other teams. The latter is important to keep the entire company aware of what you’re working on and also share the timeline for projects, so they can also better plan their work.

Want to know how the spreadsheets look like? 😉😉 Here’s a sneak peek:

Marketing team roadmap

The goals of this document:

• Outline the projects that the marketing team is working on
• Give a timeline for each project + show how it’s progressing
• Have a weekly/monthly tracking for all marketing-related metrics and KPIs

Here’s how the roadmap part looks like:

Surely, the columns and first rows are completely different for each company.

The roadmap shows what’s planned + what’s done

Marketing team KPI tracking

To have a quick overview of whether our work is bringing any results at all, we created a KPI sheet with all relevant metrics.

Here’s a snapshot of the KPI tracking sheet. It includes close to 200 rows of metrics and formulas.

Currently, as we’re still figuring out our marketing strategy, we monitor the results on a weekly basis to see if there’s an uplift in results thanks to marketing activities we did the past week. Later on, we’ll likely switch to monthly reporting.

The sheet has more than 200 rows with different KPIs

Big thanks to MeetFrank’s performance marketer Olena for helping to fill in this monster sheet. 🙏

Content planning sheets

To help team members working on social media and content marketing to get up to full speed, we also set up new planning sheets for those two areas.

Here’s the social media plan we’re currently using.

The format is too scrappy for long-term but worked for a quick kick-off

The social media plan is not yet complete, and we’ll likely restructure it + add performance tracking metrics for each post (to understand what works best).

We review the social media + blog content plans on a weekly basis and inform the Design team of all the needed creatives.

Want to learn more about marketing strategy? See the list of best books on marketing to dust up your skills.

Online ads strategy

To get the new Facebook ad campaigns live, I took a bit of a shortcut through the brainstorming and planning process.

So we created Confluence guides with ad creatives and campaign setup specs together with MeetFrank’s performance marketer Olena.

That’s how the Confluence guide looks like for each campaign:

We have clear setup rules for all global ad campaign types

Instead of spending (wasting?) a few weeks of time at team meetings, discussing the best ad strategy, I just outlined the one to get started with. The goal was to get ads live fast. And later on, we can optimize and A/B test all we want. We know most of the best practices anyway, so why not implement them right away. 💁

Once all the documents were ready, we reviewed them together with the team, confirmed with the management team, and set to work: hands-on and fast-fast-fast.

MeetFrank marketing team’s spirit animal – Image source

Week 3: Launching the new strategy and checking results

As we built the entire marketing strategy more or less from zero, we also needed tons of new ad copies and visuals.

We wanted to get the ads live fast, but the designer working on ads was on vacation. 🙃

So I created the first designs on my own and then asked another in-house designer to review and improve them. We probably saved around 2 weeks in time.

Ad creatives are a constant work in progress

Our performance marketer Olena set up all the new acquisition, remarketing, and engagement ad campaigns in around one week while our designer Mo worked on all of the new designs.

After that, we could start waiting for the results to come in, optimize the campaigns, and keep working on new ideas to test.

I’m not going to touch upon creating the Facebook ads strategy for too long, as more can be read in some other articles:

• Copywriting hacks and tips for Facebook ads and social media posts
• B2B Facebook ads: building a marketing funnel + best practices

We kept looking at the results in the Facebook Ads Manager, our KPI sheets, and also asked the other teams if they see a positive trend.

The initial picture is looking good, but there is SO much more to do. 🔥

Now that we’ve got the basics covered, we can dive in to analyze each marketing activity’s results and ROI + double down on things we see driving the highest growth.

Key takeaways

By now, the first blog article is out after a month-long pause, we’ve launched a few social media giveaways, and all acquisition, remarketing, and engagement ad campaigns are up and running. 🤜💥🤛 to the team.

Our marketing intern Yelyzaveta is testing new post types on MeetFrank’s Instagram page

Looking back at the first month working with MeetFrank again, I collected a few learnings that might also be helpful for other marketers.

So here they are.

1. Make the company’s business strategy crystal clear to yourself

Do not even start to create a marketing strategy before you don’t fully understand what are the company’s 3-month, 6-month, and 12-month goals and high-level KPIs.

It took me multiple meetings with Kaarel (CEO) to fully grasp what we want to achieve and how the marketing team can best contribute to that goal.

Yes, it took some time, but at least everything we now do is supporting the broad-level company growth. Which is why the marketing teams are for.

2. Prioritize your time + delegate

Joining as a part-time, not full-time CMO created an urgent need to make the most use of my time. On the other hand, I’m quite impatient and want to roll things out asap. #cognitivedissonance

And then there were all the other teams, coming to the marketing team with their ideas and requests… Which is not a bad thing in itself, but can easily derail from the top priorities.

We actually get along very nicely with the sales team ❤️

How to handle the load of ideas and requests as a new CMO? Should you try to tackle the small things first and then focus on the big picture? – Definitely not.

It is easy to get caught up in small daily tasks and in 2 months’ time look back and understand you didn’t get to the high-ROI activities.

As a team lead, you’re hired to work on things nobody else in the team can.

So I did my best to set my focus on developing the strategy rather than helping with daily tasks.

Looks familiar? – Image source

Here’s the approach I used to prioritize my time, more or less:

• Make a list of the 100+ things you’d like to do / that people are asking you to do in the first month
• Prioritize the tasks based on the potential ROI, urgency, and their “delegateability”
• Choose 5 most impactful things and plan to finalize these on the 1st month
• Choose 10 next most impactful things and plan to finalize these on the 2nd month
• Avoid being a blocker for your team: if you can’t give them input fast enough for a task, delegate the full responsibility to them

Here are some of the things I wanted to work on, but postponed as they were low ROI (compared to writing documentation and guidelines + creating an online ad strategy): reviewing email and push notification copy, writing social media posts’ copy, writing blog articles. They’re still important, but can be handled by someone else and later.

3. Keep everyone informed about the progress

Even if you can’t do everything that all teams expect you to, show them the progress. ⏳

On top of keeping the marketing team roadmap updated, I like to post weekly updates on the entire team’s progress for the entire company to read.

Keep the entire company informed

The CEO knows we’re moving things forward.

The other teams know we probably have higher priorities than some tasks they asked help with.

Everyone knows what’s been done and what will happen next.

Perfect.

4. Roll out the MVP, then start optimizing

I am not 100% sure whether this is always the best approach.

But at least that’s how I personally like to work: Get the first campaigns out fast and leave the optimization for later stages.

We managed to create 20+ different new ad creatives and launch 10+ Facebook ad campaigns in less than 2 weeks. Now, we can focus on focus on testing new creatives, targeting, and optimization methods.

One of the new ads we created

I don’t see a big point of working on a strategy and running brainstorming meetings for 1-2 weeks, then launching a campaign, and still having a high chance of it not succeeding.

It’s much better to test things fast, fail/win fast, and then pivot or scale the marketing activities.

5. Find a good balance between micro-management and getting things moving fast

When joining a new team, I do my best to give everyone my immediate trust and assume they know what they’re doing.

At the very beginning to get things running fast + share my past experience with the team, I write more specific guidelines (like how much to spend on social media boosts, whom to target, how to write blog/ads copy, etc. to get things to top-quality faster.) In the long run, I really like the idea that my team could also get everything done without me.

It’s always better to explain the macro-level plans, the right logic of thinking, and share the best practices than to say to people “here’s exactly what to do.” Even if I don’t 100% agree with the output all the time, it’s better to have an independently working team.

As a new CMO, you’re allowed to change the rules of how things should be done quite a bit. But remember that you also need to earn the team’s respect by sharing guidance that’s relevant + then also acting by it yourself.

6. Bonus tip: Get social credit by bringing plants to the office

If you’re the creative CMO type, one thing you can do that affects the entire team’s work results is to make the office look nicer. Yes, it’s quite low-ROI to just make the office feel better to work at. But then again… Is it?

It feels so much better 🌿🐒🌿

What’s next?

O.M.G. there is still so much to do.

Currently, the highest priority is to measure results, roll out the next test projects in our global marketing strategy and scale up the acquisition on both sides of the marketplace.

We’re also hiring a full-stack marketer to work on our blog content, email marketing funnel, and many other projects. Download the MeetFrank app to see the job offer and apply.

The post 1st Month as a New CMO – Where to Get Started? MeetFrank Case Study appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

When searching for the list of best books on marketing to read, I came across many articles, but none of them showcased the latest books combined with my favourite classics.

So I decided to create my own, the most recommended part of this article being the cult marketing books list that I honestly think every marketer should read.

This article mentions more than 80 digital marketing and branding books from the 1960s through to 2019, each having something special to teach you – from creating advertising strategies to building the products that get people hooked.

Here’s a quick list of the 10 books I highly recommend, with a link to their Amazon pages, in case you prefer to quickly browse through.

My favourite 10 marketing books of all time:

1. Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
2. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini
3. Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy
4. Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant
5. Start with Why by Simon Sinek
6. The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Scott
7. Everybody Writes by Ann Handley
8. Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger
9. Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday
10. The Advertising Concept Book by Pete Barry

And now, an in-depth list of all the best marketing books covering everything from digital to branding to growth hacking.

The best marketing books published in 2019/2020

1. InstaBrain: The New Rules for Marketing to Generation Z by Sarah Weise

This book is definitely going to my reading list as a promising way to learn the latest Instagram advertising hacks.

Learn what gets people hooked on Instagram, how the audiences make their purchasing decisions, and how to tailor your marketing strategy to attract young audiences.

Learn more about Instagram ads by checking out this list of the best Instagram ads from leading brands.

The key thing you will learn: How to succeed in Instagram marketing and create content that the millennial audiences want to engage with.

2. Digital Marketing Strategy: An Integrated Approach to Online Marketing by Simon Kingsnorth

This second edition of the bestselling digital marketing guide, published in 2019, provides a step-by-step framework for planning, using, and measuring of all popular digital platforms and marketing tactics.

Ranging from social media marketing, SEO, content creation and UX to customer loyalty, automation and personalized advertising, this book features cutting-edge best practices on marketing automation, messaging and email, online and offline integration, the power of technologies such as AI, and even covers the new data protection and privacy strategies.

The key thing you will learn: A quick overview of various digital marketing channels.

3. Becoming A Digital Marketer: Gaining the Hard & Soft Skills for a Tech-Driven Marketing Career by Gil Gildner

Want to get started as a digital marketer but have no idea where to start? This book is a good road guide for both fresh university graduates as well as traditional marketers.

The book touches upon topics from online advertising campaigns to building websites, understanding SEO strategy, and succeeding with email marketing.

A good overall guide that points you towards a wide range of digital marketing topics to dig deeper.

The key thing you will learn: A quick overview of various digital marketing channels.

4. Conversational Marketing: How the World’s Fastest Growing Companies Use Chatbots to Generate Leads 24/7/365 by David Cancel

Here’s the full title of this book: Conversational Marketing: How the World’s Fastest Growing Companies Use Chatbots to Generate Leads 24/7/365 (and How You Can Too). Qiute self-explanatory, right?

Modern messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp have transformed the way we interact with each other. Everyone is used to the instant messaging and getting an answer fast. Conversational chatbot marketing is focused on real-time, one-on-one conversations with customers.

The key thing you will learn: How the chatbot marketing works and how to use technology to automatically convert more leads to clients.

5. Email Marketing Demystified by Matthew Paulson

Full name of the book: : Email Marketing Demystified: Build a Massive Mailing List, Write Copy that Converts and Generate More Sales

Email marketing can be an amazingly effective (and free!) marketing channel. In this marketing book, the author Matthew Paulson presents an impressive list of little-known email marketing tactics – to build big mailing lists, write copy that converts, and to turn the readers into customers.

The book will teach you how to:

• Build a massive mailing list
• Write engaging email copy that drivers the readers to take action.
• Optimize every step of your email marketing funnel
• Keep your emails out of the spam folders

Released in 2019, the new second edition of Email Marketing Demystified includes new strategies, including how to comply with GDPR regulations and how to benefit from web push notifications.

The key thing you will learn: Howw to get started with email marketing and build a big email list fast.

6. This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See by Seth Godin

All Seth Godin books are instant marketing bestsellers.

His latest book explains how marketing is essentially offering a solution to your customers’ problems. Instead of spammy emails and irrelevant online ads, Godin teched you how to really tap into the conversation and engage your audiences with marketing that matters to them.

Among other things, you will learn how to:

• Build trust with your target audience
• Smartly position your brand
• Build a product and brand that people deeply care about
• Use powerful storytelling as a marketing strategy

The key thing you will learn: How to build a brand nad marketing strategy that creates real value for your audience.

7. SEO 2019: Learn Search Engine Optimization With Smart Internet Marketing Strategies by Adam Clarke

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) best practices change every year, with Google’s algorithms getting more and more complex.

Based on a 2014 bestseller, here’s an up-to-date version to SEO in 2019 by Google-certified exert Adam Clarke – a must-read for anyone serious about gaining organic website traffic.

Read more: How to grow your organic blog traffic from 1.6k to 32k in six months

The key thing you will learn: The latest SEO best practices from page speed optimization to mobile-responsive landing pages.

8. 3 Months to No.1: The 2019 “No-Nonsense” SEO Playbook for Getting Your Website Found on Google9

by Will Coombe

Running a successful SEO agency in London, Will Coombe’s in a great position to teach you how to reach the top of Google search results.

You will learn how to:

• Do SEO on your own or build an in-house team
• Do keyword research to unveil the low-hanging fruits
• Boost your organic search rankings with the help of social media

The key thing you will learn: How to get started with SEO and increase the organic traffic to your website.

The best cult marketing books

9. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

I can’t praise this book enough and will always give it the credit for teaching me about behavioral economics and psychological triggers that get people’s attention.

Explaining the cognitive biases we all have – from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation – Kahneman opens up a completely new world of behavioral sciences that every marketer should be aware of. Knowing about the psychological system shaping our judgments and decisions will help you create a stronger marketing strategy and come up with branding campaigns that get people truly engaged.

The book is an international bestseller and was selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011. I’d also say it’s one of the best marketing books for students.

The key thing you will learn: How irrational the human brain can be and how to use this knowledge to your advantage in business.

10. Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger

The New York Times bestseller that explains why some specific products and brands become popular. If you’re looking to build a product that people want to share with their family and friends, this book will give you some nice ideas.

You will learn how six basic principles can help almost anything to become contagious, from consumer products and policy initiatives to Instagram posts.

The key thing you will learn: How to build virality into your product and brand and creates messages, ads, and content that people will want to share.

11. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal

In this marketing book, Nir Eyal combines many years of research, consulting, and practical experience to explain a four-step process to creating “sticky” products (think Facebook and Instagram for example).

The author will share:

• Practical tips and hacks to create user habits that stick

• Actionable steps for building products people can’t get enough of

• Impressive examples from the iPhone to social media platforms

The key thing you will learn: How to create and market products that keep the users hooked over a long period of time.

12. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

This book is also available in Amazon Audible for listening.

Influence is one of the cult marketing books that keep getting reprinted over and over again. It never gets old as the human brain will always be working the same way. Writing this article, I realized I’d like to give it a third round of reading.

Teaching about the art of persuasion, the book explains how to get people to say “yes” to you.

The key thing you will learn: How to use the six universal principles (reciprocity, scarcity, authority, consistency, liking, consensus) to convince people about anything.

13. Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy

“When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.”

This quote from the book by advertising legend David Ogilvy, first published in 1985, is still relevant today. One of the key things I learned from the book is that your brand needs to have a strong USP (Unique Selling Proposition) that you keep communicating throughout your marketing activities and ads.

The key thing you will learn: How to find your product’s USP and gradually build a strong brand that people relate to a unique benefit.

Read my long review of the book here: 18 Golden Advertising Rules by Marketing Legends

14. The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout

“The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing” is a classic marketing book that covers topics from leadership to product marketing. You’ll be surprised by how many marketing tactics that were working 20 years ago are still relevant today.

The key thing you will learn: The basics of how to acquire a successful marketer’s mindset.

15. Pre-suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade by Robert Cialdini

This is the follow-up marketing psychology book that Cialdini wrote years after his initial bestseller Influence. I must admit that I was gravely disappointed with the book, the first one having been one of my favourite marketing books of all time.

According to the author, in order to change “minds,” a pre-suader must also change “states of mind.” Cialdini draws on a list of studies and stories to outline the specific techniques you can use in both online and offline marketing campaigns.

These insights will help you in two primary areas, making it one of the best books to learn marketing:

• Persuading your in-house team and managers to support your marketing strategy
• persuading your target audiences to take appropriate action

The key thing you will learn: How prime your target audience before delivering an important message, so that they’re more receptive to it.

16. Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant

Grant’s #1 New York Times bestseller examines how people (like me and you) can champion new ideas, and how to avoid falling into groupthink.

How can we come up with new ideas, policies, and practices without risking it all? This business book uses a wide array of stories and case studies spanning business, politics, sports, and entertainment, and teaches the reader to think outside of the box and notice good ideas.

I highly recommend the book, both for its impact on your way of thinking and for interesting stories, e.g. the one about a TV executive who didn’t even work in comedy but saved Seinfeld from the cutting-room floor.

The key thing you will learn: How to originate and recognize great ideas and think outside of the box.

17. Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek

More than 28 million have watched Sinek’s TED Talk based on START WITH WHY, the third most popular TED video of all time.

Sinek starts his book with a fundamental question: Why are some people and organizations more innovative, more powerful, and more profitable than others? He goes on to explain that the great minds from politicians to billion dollar business founders all started with WHY – people won’t truly be interested in your product, service, movement, or idea until they understand the WHY behind the concept.

The key thing you will learn: That your product/brand needs a reason to exist – the WHY – and how to find it.

18. The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly by David Scott

This marketing book has arguably been the most influential for me, as after reading it, I made a switch from the PR industry to online marketing in less than a month.

Scott’s book is a true eye-opener to anyone still playing by the old offline marketing rules. In today’s highly digital world, the rules have changed, and you need to focus on virality, SEO, content marketing, online advertising, and other digital strategies to get your product noticed.

The key thing you will learn: You’ll get a great overview of the modern marketing and PR tactics – the perfect starting point for any marketing career.

Read more: How to Learn Marketing

19. The Icarus Deception by Seth Godin

Seth Godin could be given the title of a “cult marketer.” In this book, he challenges the reader to find the courage to treat their work as a form of art, constantly looking for ways to improve.

Being an artist isn’t a genetic disposition or a set of specific talents. It’s an attitude you too can adopt. It’s a hunger to keep learning, make connections, and think outside of the box. If you manage to do those things a little more often you’re an artist, no matter what it says on your business card.

The key thing you will learn: The best marketers are constantly learning and testing new ideas. This book will guide you to go the extra mile and do excellent, not average job.

20. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

In his landmark marketing bestseller, Malcolm Gladwell unveils how we see the world, how we think without thinking, and how to become a better decision-maker.

Gladwell asks some interesting questions:

• Why do some people follow their instincts and win, while others end up making bad decisions?
• How do our brains really work – in the office, in the classroom, at a party?
• Why are the best decisions often impossible to explain to others?

The key thing you will learn: How our decision-making process works and how to make better, non-biased decisions.

21. Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content by Ann Handley

This is by far the best marketing copywriting book I’ve read this far, teaching both the macro- and micro-level nuances of good writing.

Everybody Writes is a go-to guide for marketers looking to attract and retain customers via stellar wriiten communication.

The sections in the books include:

• How to write better
• Easy grammar and usage rules tailored for business
• Winning your audience’s heart with masterful storytelling
• Best practices for creating credible, trustworthy content
• Content Tools: The best tools you need to get the job done

The key thing you will learn: How to write better marketing copy.

22. Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard Thaler

Nobel laureate Richard H. Thaler spent his career studying how humans are predictable, error-prone individuals. Traditional economics assumes rational actors – yet in real life, people are far from rational when it comes to making decisions.

Coupling recent discoveries in human psychology with a practical understanding of incentives and market behavior, Thaler enlightens you about how to make smarter decisions in an increasingly mystifying world (or how to apply the knowledge about irrational decision-making into marketing).

The key thing you will learn: The irrational logic of the human brain and how to use this knowledge to your advantage.

Best growth marketing books

23. Hacking Growth: How Today’s Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success By Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown

This growth marketing book dives into building a rapid growth strategy for your company. Exploring the fascinating case studies of the likes of Airbnb and Uber, the authors explore the growth engines behind these companies’ extraordinary rise.

You will learn about leading cross-functional teams and fast A/B testing and iteration that helps you acquire more customers: attain them, retain them, engage them, and motivate them to come back and buy more.

The key thing you will learn: The common tactics and ways of thinking of growth hacking.

24. Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday

Ryan Holiday’s book tells a fascinating story of how combining smart public relations, marketing and advertising, you can achieve almost any marketing results. The book is guaranteed to get you excited about growth hacking, yet you’ll have to do plenty of additional research and put in a lot of work if you want to replicate Holiday’s success.

The growth hacking theory relies on testing, tracking and scaling everything you do, which is ideal for marketing in the digital world.

The key thing you will learn: How small, well-planned efforts can lead to fast business growth.

25. Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets by Al Ramadan

The founders of a well-known Silicon Valley advisory firm looked into legendary category-creating companies and reveal how to notice and buiöd new product categories.

Presenting case studies around the inner workings of “category kings”— companies such as Amazon, Salesforce, Uber, and IKEA – this marketing book introduces the notion of “category design.” By applying category design, businesses can create new demand where none existed, changing customers’ minds so they change their expectations and buying habits.

The key thing you will learn: How to create and promote a completely new product category, gradually building a huge demand for it.

26. Top of Mind: Use Content to Unleash Your Influence and Engage Those Who Matter To You by John Hall

Building trust with your audience doesn’t happen overnight. It takes months (or even years) of calculated effort to reach and stay on top of mind with people. John Hall’s book will teach you how to use content marketing to build a meaningful relationship with your audience.

You will learn about the approach that was used to build Influence & Co. into one of “America’s Most Promising Companies,” according to Forbes, including:

• How to build a helpful, authentic, and consistent brand
• How to create digital content that enriches your target audience’s lives

The key thing you will learn: How to build a content-driven brand and create content that your audience sincerely wants to engage with.

Best branding books for marketers

27. The Advertising Concept Book: Think Now, Design Later by Pete Barry

I found this advertising book while visiting a bookstore in London and it took me a few months to work through it, with ups and downs. I came away with a fresh knowledgeable outlook to building marketing and branding campaigns. I highly recommend it.

From creative ideation to writing ad copy to building a consistent message, this book is a great guide for anyone looking to learn about branding campaigns, including different strategies used for all types of media.

The key thing you will learn: The framework for thinking like an advertising agency.

28. Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits by Debbie Millman

What is a brand? – If you don’t know the answer, here’s a book that will help you understand the concept in a more broad and meaningful way.

By asking questions around “What is a brand?”, Millman presents eye.opening answers from twenty-two interview subjects, among them Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin, and godfather of modern branding Wally Olins.

You will find a fascinating road guide to modern branding and how companies and buyers can best understand the behavior behind why we build brands and why we buy them.

The key thing you will learn: How to define the word “brand” and build a strong brand of your own.

29. Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout

Positioning describes a proven approach to creating a “position” in a prospective customer’s mind by taking into consideration your company’s own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of your competition.

The advertising gurus Ries and Trout explain how to:

• Position your brand as the industry leader
• Maintain the industry leader position as competition gets harder
• Use ad agency techniques to capture a wide market share and become a household name
• Build your branding strategy around your competition’s weaknesses
• Choose the best name for your product

The key thing you will learn: How to position your brand in a crowded market and become the leading business in your industry.

30. Designing Brand Identity: An Essential Guide for the Whole Branding Team by Alina Wheeler

This branding book will present you with a toolkit for creating, building, and maintaining a strong brand. From research and analysis through to implementing a brand strategy and design development, you will come away from this book with plenty of inspiration for building (or redefining) your own brand.

Wheeler’s book features more than 30 all-new case studies showing branding best practices and offers a proven, universal five-phase process for creating and implementing effective brand identity.

The key thing you will learn: How to design and implement a brand that will result in high business ROI.

31. How Brands Become Icons by Douglas B. Holt

In his bestseller marketing book, the former Harvard Business School professor Douglas B. Holt lays down what marketers need to know if they want to build an authentic brand that truly resonates with customers over a long period of time, not just temporarily because of a low price or hype.

Exploring the case studies from iconic brands including ESPN, Budweiser, Mountain Dew, and Volkswagen, Holt shows how to establish a meaningful brand connection with potential customers.

The key thing you will learn: How to build a strong brand that people will care about over a long period of time.

32. Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Digital Distraction by Derek Thomson

Nothing goes viral out of the blue. If you think that a popular movie, song, or app came out of nowhere to become a worldwide viral success in today’s crowded media environment, you’re wrong.

Each blockbuster has a secret history of power, influence, and passionate followers that turn some new products into cultural phenomena.

In his groundbreaking investigation, the Atlantic’s senior editor Derek Thompson uncovers the hidden psychology of why we like what we like and how cultural economics shape our taste. People love a familiar surprise: a product that is bold, yet conveniently recognizable.

The key thing you will learn: How to build viral products by following the simple tactics of simplicity, familiarity, frequency, influential supporters, close-knit supportive groups, memorable copy, cross-channel support, gradual innovation, and ad hoc random influences.

More marketing books to check out

If the above list of 30 bestsellers wasn’t enough for you and you’d like to explore even more marketing books, check out the titles below. 💁

33. 10x Marketing Formula: Your Blueprint for Creating ‘Competition-Free Content’ That Stands Out and Gets Results by Garrett Moon

34. Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen by Donald Miller

35. Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug

36. What Customers Crave: How to Create Relevant and Memorable Experiences at Every Touchpoint by Nicholas J. Webb

37. The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis

38. Content Inc.: How Entrepreneurs Use Content to Build Massive Audiences and Create Radically Successful Businesses by Joe Pulizzi

39. All Marketers Are Liars: The Underground Classic That Explains How Marketing Really Works–And Why Authenticity Is the Best Marketing of All by Seth Godin

40. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler

41. The Art of the Click: How to Harness the Power of Direct-Response Copywriting and Make More Sales by Glenn Fisher

42. Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less by Joe Pulizzi

43. Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull

44. The Adweek Copywriting Handbook: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Powerful Advertising and Marketing Copy from One of America’s Top Copywriters by Joseph Sugarman

45. The Choice Factory: 25 Behavioural Biases That Influence What We Buy by Richard Shotton

46. Copywriting: Successful Writing for Design, Advertising and Marketing by Mark Shaw

47. Creative Advertising: Ideas and Techniques from the World’s Best Campaigns by Mario Pricken

48. Book of Ideas: a Journal of Creative Direction and Graphic Design – Volume 1 by Radim Malinic

49. How to Do Better Creative Work by Steve Harrison

50. Made to Stick : Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath

51. Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior by Jonah Berger

52. Integrated Marketing Communications: Putting It Together & Making It Work by Don E. Schultz, Stanley I. Tannenbaum,‎ and Robert F. Lauterborn

53. The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business by Rita Gunther McGrath

54. AdCult USA by James Twitchell

55. Brand New Name: A Proven, Step-by-Step Process to Create an Unforgettable Brand Name by Jeremy Miller

56. Content Marketing For Traffic And Sales: How To Use Direct Response Copywriting, For More Effective Content Marketing by Daniel Daines-Hutt

57. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and‎ Renee Mauborgne

58. Tap: Unlocking the Mobile Economy by Anindya Ghose

59. The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing by Rich Brooks

60. The Business of Social Media: Clients and Customers Not Just Likes & Followers by Angela K. Denton

61. Location is (Still) Everything: The Surprising Influence of the Real World on How We Search, Shop, and Sell in the Virtual One by David Bell

62. The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period! 2.0 by Stoney DeGeyter

63. 500 Social Media Marketing Tips: Essential Advice, Hints and Strategy for Business by Andrew Macarthy

64. Content Marketing for PR: How to Build Brand Visibility, Influence and Trust in Today’s Social Age by Trevor Young

65. Ultimate Guide to Link Building by Eric Ward & Garrett French

66. Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company’s Future – and What to Do About It by Gabe Weisert

67. Overdeliver: Build a Business for a Lifetime Playing the Long Game in Direct Response Marketing by Brian Kurtz

68. The Unexpected: Breakthrough Strategies to Supercharge Your Business and Earn Loyal Customers for Life by Howard Brodsky

69. Giftology: The Art and Science of Using Gifts to Cut Through the Noise, Increase Referrals, and Strengthen Retention by John Rulin

70. Powering Content: Building a Nonstop Content Marketing Machine by Laura Busche

71. Crisis Ready: Building an Invincible Brand in an Uncertain World by Melissa Agnes

72. Getting Everything You Can out of All You’ve Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform and Out-Earn the Competition by Jay Abraham

73. When Coffee and Kale Compete: Become Great at Making Products People Will Buy by Alan Klement

74. Get Online: 6 Simple Steps to Launching a Digital Marketing Strategy for the Non-tech Savvy by Stacey Kehoe

75. Crossing The Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products To Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey A. Moore

76. Points: A Blue Print for Digital Marketing Strategy by Sergio Restrepo

77. Exactly What to Say: The Magic Words for Influence and Impact by Phil M. Jones

78. Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter by Scott Adams

79. The Impact Equation: Are You Making Things Work or Just Making Noise? by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith

80. The One Sentence Persuasion Course – 27 Words to Make the World Do your Bidding by Blair Warren

81. Magnetic Marketing: How To Attract A Flood Of New Customers That Pay, Stay, and Refer by Dan S. Kennedy

82. Whatever You Think, Think The Opposite by Paul Arden

83. Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing by Harry Beckwith

84. You, Inc.: The Art Of Selling Yourself by Harry Beckwith and Christine Clifford Beckwith

The post 80+ BEST Marketing Books – 2021 [Updated] appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.

Which is exactly how writing this post feels.

Thoughts flashing through want to tell out loud the big announcement. Speak about all the once-in-a-lifetime-cool stuff that happened throughout the past 2.5 years. And also, share the reasons for leaving the Head of Marketing role in Bolt to go back to freelance consulting.

—

I joined Bolt 2.5 years ago, my months-long reluctance to getting hired for a full-time position having softened up after meeting the core management team at a startup conference. These guys were having tons of fun while growing the company, opening one new market after another. I wanted in. 

I spent my first year in Bolt as a full-stack marketer, focusing on scaling the paid acquisition strategy and helping out wherever I could. In the early days, we only had one designer in the company, so I ended up designing my first Facebook ad campaign creatives on my own. Talk about scrappy and hands-on…

In the past 1.5 years, Bolt expanded to hundreds of new cities, launched e-scooters and Bolt Food, and closed new investment rounds. As the company grew from a startup into a unicorn tech company, we needed the Marketing team to keep up. Keeping up with such a rapid growth meant that we had 3-4 new job openings to the global Marketing team open at all times, with 5+ interviews per week.

Also, there were many new projects that nobody in the company owned yet. Being the scrappy growth marketer that I am, I particularly enjoyed the ad hoc projects that at first glance seemed challengingly impossible. Like designing, printing, and delivering 400 waterproof e-scooter stickers to Paris for a launch just one week ahead. Or making the rebranding from Taxify to Bolt happen in just a few months once we had settled on the name. Or getting the @bolt Facebook and Instagram handles that were owned by Facebook itself. I bet everyone in the company has a similar story of their own.

It’s been the most challenging, fascinating, and eye-opening two and a half years of my life. And I couldn’t be more grateful for having been part of this journey, growing together with people who’ve become close friends and have shared unmeasurable know-how.

So, naturally, giving up the global Head of Marketing position in one of the most successful European tech companies isn’t a decision I made overnight. Throughout the past three months, I’ve had (almost too many) moments of doubt.

But I know it’s time for me to move on. 

In my heart, I am still the scrappy marketer who enjoys working on hands-on projects and growing startups. Managing a team of 30 people, my role in Bolt has shifted to that of a team lead, with most of my time spent on meetings, analyzing the reports, and working on budgeting. At some point, I realized that this is not what I like to do: 9 to 5 schedule, not enough time for creative projects, and no days to type away on blog articles.

I know there are many great marketers who enjoy leading a big team, it’s just not for me. At least not yet.

I have grown very close with the team, and feel that in the past 6 months, we’ve finally grown into a mature marketing team with a strong tracking and reporting structure. In a way, we’ve only now reached the point to really start doing world-class marketing at full speed. On one hand, thinking about this makes it even harder to leave. On the other hand, I know the team can handle all the upcoming challenges on their own, and keep growing results without my input. Whomever the torch of leading Bolt’s global marketing team will pass to, will be lucky to join. 

[Getting sentimental]

—

What’s next?

From January 2020, I am switching back to freelance consulting + working on my blog and a book on growth marketing.

I am both thrilled and cheerless thinking about it.

I know I am going to miss the Bolt team and working on such a high-impact global project. Yet I am also excited about soon being able to work on personal creative projects, this blog, and consulting new soon-to-be-unicorn (:p) brands.

And, as Markus, the CEO of Bolt told me, the company is here to stay, it’s just getting started. So who knows… Maybe I’ll get a chance to re-join full-time in the future. As for now, I will stay working on some Bolt projects on a freelance basis. Seriously, thanks for bearing with me. 💚

K.

The post Back to Freelancing appeared first on Marketing Fix blog.