Every business owner knows the indispensable value of email marketing. From promotional emails, newsletters to advertisements, the scope is endless for well-crafted emails. It’s safe to say that this trend is here to stay.
On average, an individual receives over 121 emails each day. And marketing/promotional emails comprise the lion’s share of them.
In the face of such stiff competition, marketing emails need to be informative, intriguing, and entertaining, all rolled into one. To find out the various ways to make your business emails more alluring, continue reading this post.
A guide to crafting the best business emails
Everything about emails and email marketing is an art. And, just like any other art, there are various nuances to it. From nailing the subject line to focusing on the audience, a lot goes into a successful business email. See for yourself!
The subject line of your email is your opening salvo, and you need to get it right. Statistics show that by sending out emails with personalized subject lines, the consumers are 22.2% more likely to open them.
Even the length of your subject line has a vital role to play. For instance, research has shown that 6-10 words long email subject lines have the highest open rates, at 21%.
Here’s a list of the other things you can do to develop a winning email subject line:
Use action words to create a sense of urgency
Convey a powerful message
Prompt consumers into taking action by promoting the value
2. Make the Customer Feel Important
Often, business emails go overboard with their marketing. Look at it this way. If you only talk about your products and business in the emails, there is no room for your customer.
That’s why it is essential to place your customers at the very centre of the emails.
For instance, don’t talk about how you developed the fabric for the new range of jeans that your business is launching. Instead, tell your customers how comfortable the jeans are going to be.
3. Create and Provide Value
It’s effortless. If you want consumers to open and read the email, you need to entice them with the promise of value. This is precisely what the shoe retailers TOMS did.
When customers subscribe to the TOMS mailing list, they get sent 2-5 successive emails. These emails are a part of their automated welcome email series, which include the following:
A vivid narration of their brand story
A discount coupon or code
Links to different sections of their website
A mention about the social cause that’s dear to them
In short, TOMS welcome emails are jam-packed with value and are customer-centric. And that’s what makes them wildly successful.
Even Shane Barker, a digital marketing consultant, believes that companies should not underestimate the power of welcome emails and be used to nurture strong customer relationships.
This is important if you want your marketing emails to avoid the dreaded spam folders. Evaluate your business email domain reputation. You can use many online tools in this regard, like SenderScore.org, TrustedSource, Postmaster Tools, etc.
Alternatively, you can create an account solely meant for your business’ email marketing campaigns.
Get this: If your reputation score falls between 91-100, there’s a 92% chance that your marketing emails will land safely in the customer’s inbox.
It’s time for the million-dollar question: How often should businesses send marketing emails? Well, it entirely depends on the nature of your products and services and the preferences of your target demographics.
Monitor the consumer response to your emails for a while. Identify a frequency that works. Maybe it’s twice a month. Perhaps it’s once a week. Finally, stick to the schedule.
By doing so, you’ll generate anticipation amongst your customers, and your emails will be well-received.
6. Include Button CTAs
Here’s a fun fact: People are obsessed with pushing buttons. Also, they are a great choice if you want to encourage customers to buy from you. Thus, it would be a good idea to include button CTAs in your emails.
To make your CTAs more actionable, keep the following in mind:
Use action words to create a sense of urgency
Choose contrasting colours
Keep it short
Provide value
And, et voila, you’ll have more people opening your company’s marketing emails.
7. Visual Appeal Matters a Lot
A lot has been said about the attention span of customers. For emails, the span is pegged at 11-15 seconds. Your email needs to do something incredible in this tiny time frame to bait the customers into reading further.
This is where your email’s visual appeal will matter a lot. It would be great to go all out. Listed below are a couple of things you can do:
Use interesting fonts that are easy to read
Throw in images, videos, animations – anything to break the text trail
Think long and hard about the mobile and PC layouts
Are the products of your business targeted at different demographics? Then, segmented email marketing is an absolute necessity.
Not only is this a tremendous data-driven marketing strategy, but it is also helpful in sending meaningful emails across your vast customer base. Eventually, as the open email rates improve, so will the conversion rates.
Segment your customers, understand their needs and send them emails accordingly.
9. Mix up Your Content
No, uniformity is not a good policy when it comes to email content. Don’t use your emails to send your customers newsletters all the time. Think differently. Given the versatility that email as a medium brings to the table, there’s a lot you can send:
Infographics
Offer-specific emails
Emails that tell a story
Put on your thinking hats. Rest assured, it will be a rewarding endeavour.
Wrapping Up
With sufficient planning, you can easily make your business emails more enticing to customers. In addition to the nine ways mentioned above, focusing on email deliverability is also a good idea.
Even if your customers only open a few promotional emails a day, make sure that yours is one of them!
Shirley Stark is currently working at InfoCleance as a Marketing Team Lead. She Has hands-on experience in B2B marketing and loves to write blogs, tips, reading b2b articles, creating business strategies, and traveling.
If you haven’t been using email marketing tactics to support your SEO efforts, now is the time to start. In today’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus explains how to use the complementary powers of these strategies over and over again, so that each becomes bigger and more powerful the more you do it.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a larger version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I’m Cyrus Shepard. I hope you’re enjoying this video no matter which day of the week you’re watching it on. Today I want to talk about SEO and email marketing, specifically five simple tips for SEO and email marketing flywheels.
What is a flywheel?
So when I talk about SEO and email marketing flywheels, what do we mean by flywheel? Well, that’s where we’re using the power of SEO to grow our email marketing list and conversely using our email marketing list to grow our SEO for more website traffic. There are actual ways you can do that and doing it over and over and over again so that each becomes bigger and more powerful the more you do it.
So it’s like a flywheel. It’s really hard to get started. But as you get going, it gets easier and easier and easier, and everything grows a little bit more effectively. So if you’re an experienced SEO and email marketer, this video may not be for you. But if you primarily do SEO and you’re looking for ways to improve your mail marketing, or you’re primarily an email marketer and you’re looking for ways to grow your SEO, these are the tips for you.
Set goals
So let’s talk about our goals. What are we trying to accomplish with this email SEO marketing flywheel? First of all is simply more visitors, more visitors to your website content, because more visitors usually leads to more links, sharing, and things like that. The links and sharing can be positive SEO signals to Google, which actually lead to higher rankings.
So if we can get more people to our content through our email, the downstream effect of that could be higher rankings and more traffic generally naturally generated through Google search results. But also we want bigger and more powerful email marketing lists because your marketing list is one of your best marketing channels, especially if you segment users, which we’re going to talk about in just a little bit.
Ultimately, we want more conversions and sales. Whatever your marketing and business goals are, that’s what we want to achieve with this flywheel effect.
How to achieve those goals
1. Incentivize sign-ups
So let’s talk about the specifics, how are we going to get into it. First of all, we want to get more sign-ups from our content, from our website material. So we want to incentivize sign-ups.
Now the important thing to realize is you don’t have to incentivize sign-ups just through SEO. You can do it through any marketing traffic channel. That’s direct traffic, social media traffic, and referral traffic. Any way that people are visiting your content, you want to target those to incentivize for sign-ups to your email marketing list. So one of the ways I like to do this through SEO is through what a lot of people call content power-ups.
That’s where you’re incentivizing sign-ups by offering bonus or exclusive content in exchange for people to sign up for your list. For example, this is “5 Simple Tips for SEO and Email Marketing.” What if at the end of this post I would offer five additional bonus tips in exchange for signing up for exclusive content? The idea is that you want to offer something that they can’t find on the website. That could be a tool, some additional content, downloads, any sort of free bonus, a coupon, whatever you can think of, something exclusive to incentivize those sign-ups from your content.
2. Segmentation
Second tip, we don’t want to dump everything onto the same large email list. We want to make sure that we’re segmenting those sign-ups by topic and interest.
Unless your site is very narrowly focused, you generally want to segment your list among different topics. For example, here at Moz, we cover SEO, but we cover many, many different types of SEO based on user interest. So there’s local SEO, there’s technical SEO, there’s copywriting, there’s link building, all these niche interests that we want to segment users by.
So there’s a couple different ways to segment. One is self-segmentation, where people can check a box and say I’m interested in this and this and this. But a little bit easier is automatic segmentation based on the type of content that people are visiting. So on your technical SEO pages, if that’s what you were doing, you would put people onto a technical SEO sign-up list and make it clear that they’re receiving technical SEO tips.
Always make it clear what they’re receiving. But this segmentation is going to come in useful in just a little bit.
3. Content promotion
So the third thing, the third tip, and this is where we’re getting into the meat of it, is content promotion. This is where we’re using our email list to send traffic back to our website. When people think about SEO and email marketing flywheels, this is what they typically think about.
They think about the content promotion aspect. Now the important thing is we’re not trying to promote all of our content. No, we want to promote our best content, because your website, your visitors are coming, they’re doing a Google search. They’re not necessarily aware of what your best content is, and that’s why you want to deliver your best content. Importantly, you want to personalize it with the segmentation.
You’re not promoting all your content to all your visitors. You’re personalizing it based on their interests because you already segmented them out based on the type of content that they consumed. So if we’re sending out a technical SEO newsletter, we’re sending the best of our technical SEO content to those people who have already indicated an interest in technical SEO.
One of the most important things to remember, you don’t have to just promote your new content. It’s okay to promote the best of your old content as well, because again your users aren’t aware of what that is. So oftentimes in an introductory email, maybe the first email they receive in a series, you can promote and highlight old posts or even do it in a series.
“This is our best content over the last five years. Make sure you don’t miss this.” That old content, if it’s truly the best, will oftentimes outperform your newer content. So that’s how you can personalize and segment and send out your best content to get more promotion and more eyeballs on your best SEO content and hopefully more links, sharing, and all that to keep the flywheel going.
4. Incentivize sharing
So not only did we incentivize sign-ups, now that we’re in the email part and sending emails out, we want to incentivize sharing. That’s my fourth tip, incentivize sharing, because we don’t only want people to visit and read the content, we’re hoping that they’ll share it with their audience as well. One of the ways I like to do that is to segment my best sharers.
Now what do I mean by this? I’m not only segmenting by interest, but I’m segmenting by influence. So I might put together a list of influencers or people I know in my particular industry that have signed up. Maybe I’ve targeted them. Just like I offer people exclusive content to sign up for the email list, I’m offering my sharers exclusive content before I share it with the rest of the world.
So I might email my sharing segment and say, “Hey, we just published a post. We haven’t told anybody. We’re going to announce it on social tomorrow. But I wanted to let you know about it ahead of time if you want to share it with your followers.” Because we made it exclusive, we haven’t shared it with our followers, it gives our influencers something to share and it makes them feel special and sharing it out with their own audience.
There are different strategies that you can use to do that. But it is often an effective tactic to segment your best sharers. It’s a little advanced, but that can incentivize sharing and hopefully help out your SEO.
5. Keyword research
Finally, when we talk about SEO, we talk about keyword research. Keyword research is one of those SEO areas that works really well in incorporating into email.
Now, here at Moz, we have a tool called Keyword Explorer. There are other tools out there. But millions of keywords suggestions. Traditionally, in SEO, you use keyword research to determine your content, targeting keywords that your audience has interest in. We have lots of guides here at Moz on how to do that, how to target content around keywords.
But you can also use that keyword research in your emails. One of the most important places to use them is your email subject line. If you know the interest that your audience is interested in, through your segmentation, you can start to understand the keywords that drove them to their content, and using those same keywords in your email subject lines can improve your open rates. But that’s not the only place.
One of my favourite places to use keywords is in the sign-up CTA. So when you have a sign-up form on your website, you can use a generic sign-up form, like, hey, sign up for our newsletter. Okay, that’s not very effective. But if you use the keywords, the targeted keywords sign up for our technical SEO tips or our local SEO or our best dog food recipes, the keywords that people use to find your website are going to be the best keywords to incorporate into your CTAs to get them to sign up. You use keywords in your email subject lines to get them back to your content and so on and so forth. It’s another part of the effective flywheel.
Bonus: turn your best emails into content
So finally, bonus tip, I want to make sure that you don’t forget to turn your best emails into content. Your content doesn’t have to live exclusively in separated channels. If you’re writing killer emails to your audience, that get a lot of engagement, that have super high open rates, those are emails that you can turn into content for your website.
Or if you have a popular newsletter, you can simply archive all your emails into HTML so people can search. You may not want to do that for certain reasons if the quality isn’t very good. But if the emails are actually good, go ahead and turn them into content, because that’s going to help your SEO as well.
All right. I hope you enjoyed these tips. If you have any questions about email or SEO, please reach out to the team here at Moz. We’re here to help. Hope you enjoyed it, everybody, and please share this video. All right, thanks.
The pace of digital change in business shows no sign of slowing in 2022. The latest research from MuleSoft identifies 7 key digital transformation trends that will shape the future of work in 2022 and beyond.
The latest research from MuleSoft identifies hyper-automation, hybrid experiences, distributed environments and explosion of data as some of the new challenges and opportunities facing all businesses. The research points to an accelerated digital transformation in business for 2022 and beyond with seven key trends.
The top 7 trends shaping digital transformation in 2022 are:
Trend 1: The future of work will be built on connected, hybrid experiences. The workplace has rapidly evolved, and with it, employee expectations — forcing organizations to deliver digital‑first and connected experiences to drive productivity and retain talent.
Trend 2: The composable business matures. As the pressure to innovate faster continues to rise, organizations will seek even greater agility, leading to an increased drive to composable and event‑driven architectures.
Trend 3: The rise of the business technologist. With the increasing pressure of the digital imperative on organizations, business technologists will come to the fore as an essential partner in IT departments’ efforts to accelerate innovation.
Trend 4: Hyperautomation unlocks digital value. Hyperautomation will unlock productivity, accelerate time‑to‑market, and transform employee and customer experiences.
Trend 5: Security‑by‑default is a must‑have. Security‑by‑default will become a need‑to‑have as organizations increasingly realize their applications and automations are only as secure as the composable blocks on which they are built.
Trend 6: The rise of hybrid, distributed ecosystems adds complexity. As the digital world embraces hybrid and multi‑clouds, finding a universal way of integrating and managing these environments will become essential to successful digital transformation.
Trend 7: A single source of truth becomes key to the data‑driven business. As digitization continues to drive an increasing amount of data, organizations will seek a single source of truth where consumers can get the right data in the right context at the right time.
Here are the top takeaways of the 7 trends shaping digital transformation in 2022 and beyond:
Future of work built on connected, hybrid experiences
Gartner estimates that the use of collaboration platforms alone surged 44%. between 2019 and 2021. McKinsey estimates that more than 20% of the global workforce — although mainly those in high‑skilled roles in verticals such as finance, insurance, and IT — could work most of the time away from the office without any impact on productivity. Automation will play a key role in a hybrid and connected work environment. The use of low‑code techniques will be essential, having been identified by 42% of business users as critical to their ability to create better-connected employee experiences.
Here are some stats around the use of automation to create better-connected employee experiences:
30% of organizations have implemented automation initiatives to create better-connected employee experiences
44% of organizations are currently implementing automation initiatives to create better-connected experiences
Top automation priorities for 2022 include: improving operational efficiency (54%), improving productivity (49%), and creating better-connected experiences (41%)
Top digital transformation investment priorities in 2021 to ensure teams can collaborate effectively included: process changes (66%) and technology (49%)
Use of automation initiatives to create better connected employee experiences
The composable business matures
According to MuleSoft, the 2020s will be a period of seamless digital experiences. To make this a reality, organizations will need to think carefully about how they drive enhanced agility, which will lead to a new era of event‑driven architectures and composable businesses in 2022.
According to MuleSoft, the always‑on digital economy brings huge pressure for organizations to get things right for the end-user. According to PwC, one in three consumers will walk away from a brand they love after just one bad experience. One of the most effective ways for organizations to drive agility and meet these rapidly rising expectations is through becoming a composable business built on reusable APIs. These APIs can be used to turn the organization’s digital capabilities and data into a series of interchangeable building blocks that employees can reuse in other ways to build their own solutions.
The future of digital commerce is a great example of a connected and composable model. Gartner defines this as “Composable Enterprise”, with composable commerce as the expression of this idea applied to shopping infrastructure. Per Gartner, the composable business means creating an organization made from interchangeable building blocks.
The idea of composable business operates on four basic principles:
Reusable APIs are a great way to achieve this, which is why 96% of global organizations already use public or private APIs. The research identifies important concepts and differentiation with APIs with a focus on event-driven APIs and event-driven architectures. The research concludes that event‑driven architectures are more flexible and extensible than their RESTful counterparts, supporting the fluid, real‑time interactions that consumers expect today.
Four in five organizations recognize the need to make data and integration accessible to business users to increase productivity, deliver connected experiences, and drive innovation.
36% of organizations say they have a mature approach to enabling non-IT users to integrate apps and data sources through APIs easily
44% of organizations say they are developing plans to enable non-IT users to integrate apps and data sources through APIs
Composable thinking, which keeps you from losing your creativity. Anything is composable. Combining the principles of modularity, autonomy, orchestration and discovery with composable thinking should guide your approach to conceptualizing what to compose and when.
Composable business architecture ensures that your organization is built to be flexible and resilient. It’s about structure and purpose. These are structural capabilities — giving you mechanisms to use in architecting your business.
Composable technologies are the tools for today and tomorrow. They are the pieces and parts and what connects them all together. The four principles are product design goals driving the features of technology that support the notions of composability.
The composable business matures
The rise of business technologists
According to MuleSoft, the volume of digital initiatives doubled during the pandemic, making it even more difficult for already stretched teams to keep up with the needs of the business. In 2022, business technologists will relieve some of this pressure by working alongside IT teams to accelerate innovation. Gartner found that those organizations that successfully enable business technologists are 2.6x more likely to accelerate digital business outcomes. However, to do so, they will need the right tools at their disposal.
By 2024, 80% of technology products and services will be built by those who are not technology professionals, according to Gartner. Low or no‑code approaches and AI‑assisted development tools hold the key to success. Gartner found 77% of business technologists routinely use a combination of automation, integration, application development or data science and AI tools in their daily work. Some 80% of business users agree that if data and IT capabilities were discoverable and available in packaged business capabilities (PBCs), they and their colleagues could create solutions and deliver digital projects more quickly. Over a third (36%) say they have a mature approach to enabling non‑IT users to integrate apps and data sources through APIs easily. 80% of technology products and services will be built by those who are not technology professionals by 2024.
According to Gartner, on average, 41% of employees outside of IT — or business technologists — customize or build data or technology solutions. Gartner also predicts that half of all new low-code clients will come from business buyers that are outside of IT organizations by end of year 2025. 41% of organizations make an average of 41% of their internal software assets and components available for developers to reuse. 86% of organizations said if business users could securely create their own connected experiences using low or no-code, it would improve business outcomes.
The rise of business technologist
Hyperautomation unlocks digital value
Automation will be a fundamental driving force for the modern digital enterprise rather than being used in piecemeal projects. Hyperautomation is about scaling automation across the enterprise via the reuse of processes and the deployment of multiple, integrated technology capabilities — such as low‑code platforms, machine learning, and robotic process automation (RPA). It’s a market the analyst predicts will grow by nearly 24% from 2020 to be worth nearly $600 billion by 2022 — as organizations look to identify and automate as many processes as they can rapidly. Per Deloitte, 93% of business leaders expect to be using RPAs by 2023. MuleSoft found that most organizations are either already using or are planning to implement such automation initiatives to realize strategic goals, such as improving productivity (96%) and operational efficiency (93%) and creating better‑connected customer experiences (93%).
2021 research shows that automation will accelerate the decentralization of businesses with a digital-first investment and new capabilities strategy. Customer service is an example line of business that will see significant hyperautomation. Given their proximity to changing customer needs, customer service provides a helpful window into how workflow automation can increase a team’s flexibility, efficiency, and job satisfaction.
There is no doubt that it has been a challenging year for customer service employees. Research shows these teams have contended with a whiplash of increased case volume and complexity without commensurate increases in headcount and budget. Workflow automation, however, provides needed relief. 77% of agents say automating routine tasks allows them to focus on more complex work — up from 69% in 2018. It is telling that, even amidst a budget crunch, 71% of service decision makers say they’re accelerating automation initiatives.
One area of service automation that’s getting a lot of attention is chatbots. Currently, 83% of customers expect to engage with someone immediately when contacting a company — up from 78% in 2019. This dynamic puts pressure on already-strained teams. Unsurprisingly, we’ve concurrently seen chatbot adoption grow at a rapid pace.
Hyperautomation trends in 2022 and beyond
Security‑by‑default is a must‑have
Security concerns have always been a roadblock on digital initiatives. Some 87% of IT and business leaders claim that security considerations are slowing down the pace of innovation, while 73% say that specific security and governance concerns have increased as their systems have become more integrated. Gartner predicts that by 2022, application programming interface (API) attacks will become the most‑frequent attack vector, causing data breaches for enterprise web applications. According to Forrester, 21% of security decision‑makers plan to prioritize building security into development processes. Many more will follow suit over the coming years as the era of the business technologist continues to gather pace.
Security requirements can slow down pace of digital transformation
The rise of hybrid, distributed ecosystems adds complexity
IT and business leaders agree that the ability to create seamless digital experiences for both employees and customers is key to the success of modern organizations. In 2022, universal API management will come to the fore as organizations seek answers to this question. Cloud solutions enabled many organizations to navigate the challenges the pandemic created. However, they have also drastically increased the complexity of modern digital ecosystems. Today, 92% of enterprises have a multi‑cloud strategy, while 82% have a hybrid cloud set‑up. According to Deloitte, virtually all (97%) IT managers are planning to take a best‑of‑breed approach by distributing workloads across two or more clouds to boost resilience and support regulatory requirements.
The rise of hybrid, distributed ecosystems add digital transformation complexity
A single source of truth becomes key to the data‑driven business
The world is witnessing a data explosion. In 2020 alone, over 64 zettabytes (ZB) were created, and this volume is expected to grow at a rate of 23% up to 2025, according to IDC. Yet, things aren’t getting any easier for organizations looking to integrate, analyze, and act on this data. IT complexity, proprietary systems, and a lack of strategic direction all provide their own challenges.
To be a successful data‑driven organization in 2022, organizations must break down silos across the enterprise to create a single source of truth. Business leaders can only look to machine learning and data analytics to make sense of all their data for enhanced decision-making.
What does it mean to be a truly data‑driven business? It’s all about using the insights derived from AI‑powered analytics to transform business processes. Ultimately, the aim is to improve business outcomes, by driving greater revenues and success. According to Accenture, true data‑driven organizations experience annual growth of over 30%. In addition, 81% of businesses still don’t have a solid data strategy to maximize the full potential of their data, and a similar number don’t have the right platform in place to support their goals. API‑led connectivity is increasingly recognized as the best strategy for achieving the required level of connectivity. Indeed, API‑led connectivity can result in 3x faster project delivery, on average, and a 63% reduction in maintenance costs.
A single source of truth becomes key to data-driven business
The trends shaping digital transformation in 2022 include hyperautomation, hybrid experiences, distributed environments, and an explosion of data. MuleSoft research of these trends concludes with the following recommendation to IT and business leaders with respect to improved collaboration and execution velocity:
Empower IT teams to deliver composable services, API products, and bots at scale for the entire organization.
Empower business teams to automate integrations to common systems without code by leveraging IT’s reusable assets, support, and governance.
Automate repetitive and manual tasks with reusable and composable bots that can intelligently process documents, enter data, or take action on the user’s behalf, all without code.
To learn more about the MuleSoft report on the 7 trends shaping digital transformation in 2022, you can visit here.
Feature Image Credit: Colin Anderson Productions – Getty Images
The Yours to Make initiative includes an installation at London’s Saatchi Gallery created by digital artist and curator Zaiba Jabbar using Reels
Instagram’s “Yours to Make” initiative aims to attract young people to the platform Instagram
In a column about art and Instagram, it’s easy to ignore the other apps scrambling for social media dominance. But the fight for attention is relentless, and while Instagram may be the art world’s social platform of choice, such favouritism tends to be generational. In the mid-2010s, reports started to show that fewer young people were using Facebook while the number of over-55s signing up was growing. It was soon coined “Boomerbook”. Meanwhile, Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 initially to neutralise the threat of competition, but soon the app began to mop up the pool of young people abandoning Facebook.
Now we are facing “Millennialgram”. According to a recent survey
undertaken by the financial services firm Piper Sandler, 35% of US teenagers say Snapchat is their favourite social media platform and 30% prefer TikTok, while Instagram comes in third at 22%. A report from the New York Times
last month revealed internal documents from 2018 in which the company had named the loss of teenage users to other social media platforms as an “existential threat” and a further document from October last year that read: “If we lose the teen foothold in the US we lose the pipeline.”
The latter leaked document laid out Instagram’s marketing plan for this year, and now we are beginning to see it unfold. The platform openly announced what it calls “the next chapter in Instagram’s brand story” on its website in September. Called “Yours to Make”
it aims to “showcase how you can explore who you are with Instagram”. The announcement was accompanied by a video that shows young creatives using the various features and products on the Instagram app, including the hip-hop artist Topaz Jones, the Native American make-up artist Madrona Redhawk and the digital creator Justin Yi—“real creators and everyday users who are using our platform to push the boundaries of creativity and experimentation”, Instagram says.
The New York Times says Instagram has allocated a marketing budget of $390m this year, mostly aimed at wooing teens. In the UK, the Yours to Make film is accompanied by a social-first content series created with Channel 4’s 4Studio, a brand partnership with the culture publication Dazed, targeted digital and video adverts, and “experiential activity” such as an installation at London’s Saatchi Gallery (4-9 November).
The work at Saatchi will consist of a free-to-access, interactive “motion art installation” in the galleries—a “digital portrait of British youth culture” with Instagram Reels video content from 50 handpicked Gen Z creatives. It has been assembled by the digital artist and curator Zaiba Jabbar, who says she has been inspired by “the breadth of creativity” in the Reels. The platform is also inviting users to submit Reels about their own journeys of self-discovery—tagged #YoursToMake—for the chance to be included in the work. Time will tell if Instagram can Reel the kids back in.
Insta’ gratification is a monthly blog by Aimee Dawson, our Associate Digital Editor. Looking at how the art world and Instagram collide, each article tackles a topic around the innovations and challenges that spring up when art enters the digital world.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has announced new plans for creators to bypass 30 per cent App Store fees that Apple charges on transactions, as it prepares to build Metaverse.
In a Facebook post, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that as we build for the metaverse, we’re focused on unlocking opportunities for creators to make money from their work.
“The 30 per cent fees that Apple takes on transactions make it harder to do that, so we’re updating our Subscriptions product so now creators can earn more,” he posted.
Zuckerberg said that the company is launching a promotional link for creators for their Subscriptions offering. A
“When people subscribe using this link, creators will keep all the money they earn (minus taxes). Creators will have more ownership of their audience — we’re giving the ability for them to download the email addresses of all of their new subscribers,” he explained.
An investigation by The Financial Times has found that Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube lost around $9.85 billion in revenue after Apple introduced App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy last year.
Advertisement technology company Lotame estimated that the four tech platforms lost 12 per cent of revenue in the third and fourth quarters, which roughly translates into $9.85 billion.
Zuckerberg said that Meta is also launching a bonus programme that pays creators for each new subscriber they get “as part of our $1 billion creator investment announced this summer”.
The new iOS App Store policy requires apps to ask permission to track users’ data. The policy went into effect in April, barring apps from tracking users if they opt out.
Facebook lost the most money “in absolute terms” when compared to other social platforms due to its huge size.
“Facebook has the most to lose because the cost of running advertisements on its platform has been increasing for years,” the Financial Times report said.
Since the introduction of the Apple iOS policy, most users have opted out, leaving advertisers in the dark about how to target them.
Zuckerberg has slammed Apple for its App Store policies in the past, saying the iOS privacy changes are negatively affecting its business.
“Apple’s changes are not only negatively affecting our business, but millions of small businesses, and what is already a difficult time for them and the economy,” he said last month.
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer, said that the biggest impact to them has come from iOS 14 changes which advantaged Apple’s own advertising business.
It’s one of the great ironies of branding that, while we tend to care passionately about the precision and quality of the words that brands use to communicate, the language we use ourselves is hopelessly vague. Often, we use identical terms to describe different ideas and concepts. At other times, we use different words to describe identical ideas and concepts.
One of the most glaring examples of this is the confusion that often exists between ‘brand positioning’ and ‘brand strategy’. Positioning is often described as “the space in people’s minds that a brand wants to occupy”. The term was popularized in the 1970s by advertising executives Al Ries and Jack Trout, who argued that brands wishing to cut through in a noisy, over-communicated society, needed to develop an oversimplified message capable of reaching an oversimplified mind:
Avis: we try harder. Seven-Up: the uncola.
In the words of Ries and Trout:
“Along Madison Avenue, these are called positioning slogans. And the advertising people who write them spend their time and research money looking for positions, or holes, in the marketplace.”
And here’s where the confusion begins: Ries and Trout flip-flop between two different definitions of positioning:
1. Positioning a brand in a marketplace;
2. Positioning a brand in people’s minds.
These are related, but different activities. What happens in someone’s mind is not the same as what happens in a marketplace. ‘We try harder’ and ‘uncola’ are not parts of a market, they are ideas that brand owners want to establish in our heads.
Philip Kotler is pretty firm in his point of view on which of these two activities is best described as ‘brand positioning’. As he explains in his 2017 book, Marketing 4.0:
“Since the 1980s, brand positioning has been recognized as the battle for the customer’s mind… Brand positioning is essentially a compelling promise that marketers convey to win the customers’ minds and hearts.”
That’s good enough for me. There are as many definitions of positioning as there are brand consultancies, but I’m happy to go along with the intention expressed here. It’s about hearts as much as minds.
It’s about belief.
The precise form of this belief can vary significantly. Over twenty years ago, I was told that a brand positioning is best expressed as a vision, mission, and set of values. Years later, it became popular to distil these into an ‘essence’ or a ‘brand DNA’. Subsequently, ‘brand purpose’ reinterpreted brand positioning for a generation in search of a deeper form of meaning. In reality, these are all variations on the same theme.
They are all about establishing a belief about a brand in people’s minds.
None of these describes strategy, although I’ve noticed that ‘brand positioning’ and ‘brand strategy’ are frequently used interchangeably. I find it helpful to think of them as distinct.
Here’s why:
Strategy suggests an analytical, insight-rich, data-informed, logical process. In broad terms, it’s about deciding where to play and how to win. Brand strategy comes in many forms, but I’ve always found it helpful to think in terms of the 5Ws:
WHO: Which groups of people do we want to prioritize? WHY: What are the most powerful motivations and attitudes we can appeal to? WHERE: Where are the best places for us to reach them? WHEN: What are the most important moments and occasions to focus on? WHAT: What competing offers exist, and how can we improve upon them?
If you don’t have a clear idea of who you want your brand to resonate with, why they should care about it, where and when you need to be available to them, and what competing offers you’re up against, then you don’t have much of a strategy. When someone talks about ‘positioning a brand in a marketplace’, then I tend to think of brand strategy, not brand positioning. It’s the part of my work when I expect to be wading through data, facts, and insights. It’s when I expect to be spending my time scrolling through Excel spreadsheets. The result should be a laser-sharp definition of what a brand wants to achieve and how it intends to get there. This is the realm of KCQs, KPIs, and BHAGs.
Brand strategy is a dispassionate, rational process.
Brand positioning is the opposite.
A solid brand strategy is necessary, but not sufficient if you want to create a great brand.
It’s not enough simply to set out which parts of a market you want to compete in, or who you want to appeal to, or which of their unmet needs you intend to fulfill. This gets you to something like Marty Neumeier’s ‘onlyness’ statement for Harley-Davidson:
WHAT: motorcycle manufacturer;
HOW: that makes big, loud motorcycles;
WHO: for macho guys (and macho wannabes);
WHERE: mostly in the United States;
WHY: who want to join a gang of cowboys;
WHEN: in an era of decreasing personal freedom.
It doesn’t exactly grab you. When I look at it, I wonder, ‘what’s the point?’ This is more compellingly articulated in Harley-Davidson’s mission statement:
“More than building machines, we stand for the timeless pursuit of adventure. Freedom for the soul.”
That’s a statement of belief. Although the two are clearly related, it’s more than a simple summary of the brand strategy, because it involves a creative leap. Without this, it would be as dry and uninspiring as a brand onion.
Great brand positioning is an antidote to indifference.
In contrast to brand strategy, positioning a brand is a creative act. It’s based on imagination, not insight; inspiration, not analysis. This is the part of my job where I spend time listening to people: What motivates them? What makes them proud? What inspires them? What are their hopes for the future? What does sustainability mean to them? How do they define success in its broadest possible sense? This part of the job is about understanding the future people want to create and the role they would like their brand to play in creating that future.
Brand positioning and brand strategy play complementary roles. Without a brand strategy to back it up, brand positioning risks being a hollow statement of ambition. Without a brand positioning to make it sing, brand strategy can descend into dull, lifeless drudgery. I’ve seen examples of both. There are organizations that love the fun part of coming up with a beautiful, bold promise, but shy away from the dirty, difficult task of working out how exactly that’s going to be delivered, to whom, and how. There are also organizations that create intricate brand onions, wheels, bridges, or platforms, but are utterly bereft of a creative expression that people can actually care about and believe in.
Trying to pin precise definitions on vague marketing concepts is generally a fool’s errand, but I’ve found the distinction between brand strategy and positioning is a helpful way to make sure when I’m speaking to a client that I’m fixing the right problem. Sometimes the issue is a lack of creativity. Sometimes it’s a lack of rigor. Often, it’s both. I’ve also found the distinction is a helpful way to critique my own work: Is the positioning ‘idea’ compelling enough? Is the strategy sharp? Is there an appropriate balance of rigor and creativity?
One final thing worth mentioning is that the relationship between brand strategy and positioning is similar to the relationship between a chicken and an egg: It’s not obvious which comes first. I’ve noticed that B2B brands tend to lead with positioning, while B2C brands lead with strategy.
“Brand positioning and brand strategy play complementary roles. Without a brand strategy to back it up, brand positioning risks being a hollow statement of ambition.”
For example, when Google says it wants to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’, it’s not describing a strategy. It’s making a promise with the expectation that this statement will establish a firm belief in the minds of its employees, its investors, its customers, and the rest of the world. The role of brand strategy is to translate the positioning into a concrete activity that stretches the brand into specific areas and specific audiences: maps, news, academia, communication, hardware, and beyond.
On the other hand, when Guinness shifted its brand strategy to focus on occasional drinkers, the brand team realized that the positioning would also need to change: The brand’s emphasis on ‘waiting’ was seen as a barrier to consumption for this group. The result was a shift of positioning and comms that moved away from ‘good things come to those who wait’ and instead repositioned the brand to celebrate people with the character and confidence to stand out from the crowd.
Honestly, I don’t think it matters which comes first. What matters most is that a brand’s strategy and positioning are mutually supportive: A clear strategic direction, married with a compelling positioning that’s capable of inspiring strong creative execution. Great brand strategists seamlessly bring together the analytical and the imaginative. This is how they do it.
I’m a brand strategist with over 20 years of experience. I began my career at Interbrand, where I led their brand valuation offer, and have subsequently developed and spearheaded the consultancy teams at M&C Saatchi Clear, Dragon Rouge, and The Clearing. I’m a member of the Superbrands Council in the UK, as well as a regular conference speaker, contributor to marketing publications, and author of two books on business, branding, and sustainability.
As the founder of a bootstrapped start-up, people often ask me how I decided on which funding route I’d take when there are so many options for founders to consider.
While I don’t have a short answer to this, there’s one thing I can say: your choice of funding needs to be based on the nature of your business and the product you are dealing with.
he exact type of your business can be determined in a number of ways, but I find ‘Red Ocean’ and ‘Blue Ocean’ can be quite helpful. Coined by acclaimed business theorists, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne to classify all market strategies, Red Ocean refers to when there are a lot of competitors and you need a substantial amount of money to survive in it. Whereas Blue Ocean refers to a very niche market wherein you might see a lower growth rate but survive with considerably low investment.
While being helpful, there is of course no hard and fast rule to this theory — it’s often purely situational.
Our first product, BizTalk360 falls within Blue Ocean (no competitors, focused segment, and low customer acquisition cost) while our latest product, Document360, falls under the Red Ocean strategy. With that product, we’re competing against companies like Zendesk, Freshdesk, Confluence, Notion, and so on, so we end up spending a lot on customer acquisitions for this product.
Now that I’ve given you a bit of the background on where I’m coming from, let’s dive into what made me ultimately decide on going the bootstrapping route.
The decision to bootstrap
The initial product idea for BizTalk360 was seeded at the Microsoft Global MVP Summit in Seattle in February 2010. The first version of the product was very well received by MVPs in 2011, which led to me to officially launch the start-up the same year. Within a year, we onboarded 65 customers.
As we started to launch new products, we sort of banked on the success of our previous products and reinvested the revenues into the company to fund them. All our products have their own engineering, marketing, and sales teams working on improving the products and acquiring customers.
Today, our parent company kovai.co has 1500+ customers. We have not had to seek external funding since all our products are generating revenues.
Great products will sell
When we launched BizTalk360, we knew that we still had a long road ahead. Building the product was not much of a challenge since I have the required technical know-how. Selling the product was the tricky part as I didn’t have much experience doing that.
I started blogging very early in my career. My blog used to be very technical in nature as I specialized in a particular domain which is the BizTalk server and gradually I was able to build an audience of 15,000 followers.
When I developed BizTalk360, the blogs helped me get my first customer (a casino) all the way from Hong Kong, which was completely unknown to me until that point. While my blogging activities might’ve landed us the first customers, it was the value of the product itself that kept customers loyal.
So no matter how good your acquisition is, the retention will always come down to quality.
Scale at the right time
In my opinion, most start-ups fail due to premature scaling. That’s why knowing when to scale your start-up is one of the most crucial decisions you’ll face as a founder.
Most entrepreneurs just assume that once their product has been successfully launched, it’s time to scale up. But that’s not how it works. The product has to be periodically monitored and improved to make sure that it is not being overtaken by competitors. Your product needs to scale up along with your business.
Since our flagship product, BizTalk360, is a niche segment, we were able to be the market leaders right from the beginning and still continue to do so. The product matured completely in about fives years and the goal was all about maintaining the product, taking care of existing customers, and adding new ones. We then decided to diversify and move to new products, we simply replicated what had worked for us in similar situations.
Another thing you should do is structure your work model and business process. You should have systems in place to effectively monitor the stakeholders and processes in the organization.
But once you actually pinpoint problems through that monitoring, you need to react to them the right way. Many start-up founders think that just hiring a person can magically solve all their problems, but let me be clear: it doesn’t work.
For example, hiring a Sales Manager when your product isn’t working properly is a rookie mistake. You need to be extremely patient and persistent in the process. Ensure that your product is a market-fit product before you consider scaling your start-up.
Scaling your start-up might seem tempting sometimes, but nothing is better than the slow, steady, and organic growth of your start-up.
Check your finances — cash flow, sales, expense, and revenue — before deciding whether you want to scale up. It’s easy to overlook certain aspects when you are trying to manage multiple things at the same time. Even then, you should have an elaborate financial plan with forecasts for the future.
The bottom line is: take time to lay the groundwork before taking your start-up to the next level.
Founder & CEO, Document360 Saravana is a Microsoft BizTalk server MVP since 2007, blogger, international speaker, and active community member in the BizTalk area. Before founding Document360, he founded two other enterprise software companies: Biztalk360 and Serverless360.
“Clearly, for too many companies, the hype about data-driven decision-making is not being matched by reality.”
Those are the words from Sovan Bin, the CEO and founder of enterprise data platform Odaseva. He had more to say in this press release:
“More than three-quarters of large enterprises admit that they’re lacking fundamentals in data management, and this is preventing them from unlocking the full value of their CRM (Customer Relationship Management) data. And yet, most enterprises – 64 percent – expect that the number one benefit of CRM data is an improved customer experience. There’s a clear disconnect here – and it must be addressed by rethinking data strategies, so CRM data becomes useful and actionable.”
What prompted his statement?
It was this study that his company commissioned from research firm Forrester. It found that 78 percent of enterprises report gaps in their data management that prevent them taking full advantage of their data and 64 percent said they find it challenging to actually move CRM data to platforms where it could be valuably used. Half of large enterprises worldwide (47 percent) feel they cannot rely on their CRM data to provide a single source of truth regarding customer data.
For the past few years CRM platforms have been stressing data, data, data. They’re using AI (Artificial Intelligence) as a marketing tool to lure companies into the enticing world of being able to predict what customers and prospects will do in the future based on their prior behaviour. But the reality is not living up to the hype. Why?
Odaseva’s Bin believes it’s for two big reasons. The first is that the majority of enterprises lack the basic foundations of data management. The other is that security concerns are limiting companies’ ability to truly leverage their data. Forrester’s research recommends that business invest in more skills training, improve their “data continuity” and step up their security.
I’ve learned to take these “commissioned” studies in stride because there’s always an agenda behind the findings. Odaseva is a data platform, so obviously a narrative where data is the problem and needs to be improved serves the company’s best interests.
But the findings do match what I see. Most of my clients complain about the integrity of their CRM information and I can’t think of one that would rely on their CRM system’s data for analysis of customer behaviour, let alone sending a simple email campaign, without some human oversight. The AI tech is just not there yet. And it’s going to take some time – and bigger strides – to achieve even those goals.
CRM systems are merely cloud-based databases. It’s as simple as that. At the very least, any organization that wants to get a satisfactory amount of ROI from their CRM system needs to invest in both people and tools to ensure that the data in the system is accurate, complete and can be relied on by sales, marketing and service teams. Security is also of prime concern. And then it’s about the questions: what behaviour do we want to predict? What data do we need to predict this behaviour? What’s our confidence in these predictions? How can we leverage these analytics to grow our sales?
Figuring out the answers to this question will be of primary concern to successful companies using good CRM systems in the future. But it will time and investment. Not making that investment merely creates a mess of data that is unusable…and will certainly hurt a company’s longer term value.
Feature Image Credit: Stephen Chernin/Getty Images
I was a former senior manager at KPMG and since 1994 the owner of the Marks Group PC, a 10-person customer relationship management consulting firm based outside Philadelphia. I’ve written six small-business management books, most recently “The Manufacturer’s Book of Lists” and “In God We Trust, Everyone Else Pays Cash: Simple Lessons From Smart Business People.” Besides Forbes, I formerly wrote for The Washington Post and the New York Times and now write regularly for The Guardian, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Inc., Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine and Fox Business. I make no compensation from the number of people who read what I write.
What are we going to call this? The Great Rebundling? The Atlantic is rolling out subscriber-only newsletters, editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldbergannounced Tuesday, bringing the work of nine writers under the magazine’s single paywall.
The nine writers are Jordan Calhoun, Nicole Chung, David French, Xochitl Gonzalez, Molly Jong-Fast, Tom Nichols, Imani Perry, Yair Rosenberg, and Charlie Warzel. The Atlantic is giving a free year-long digital subscription to anyone who subscribes to any of the writers’ existing newsletters — whether that subscription was paid or not, confirmed executive editor Adrienne LaFrance.
LaFrance was less forthcoming about compensation structures (no word on whether writers who bring in more subscriptions will earn more) and whether the writers will have the same editorial freedom they’ve had as independent writers (“The Atlantic is a writer’s collective, and a place where all writers are encouraged to pursue their preoccupations and curiosities. That’s true for our staff writers and it’s true for this group of contributing writers.”) Nick Catucci, a senior editor at The Atlantic who oversees newsletters, will be the writers’ “key creative partner” and each post will get copyediting help, too.
Charlie Warzel, who left The New York Times to launch his newsletter Galaxy Brain, threw back the curtain on his decision to leave Substack in an illuminating last post.
Over seven months on Substack (I did not take a deal with the company) I made considerably less than I did working at the Times (this will be the line people quote, I guarantee, if they quote anything from this post). I grew this puppy from 0 subscribers to over 16,000. On the paid side, I got over 1,400 of you to shell out. Due to monthly subs and some generous founding members, I did manage to crack the six-figure annualized revenue number ever-so-slightly (of course I didn’t do this for a full year). Not bad! But also far from the kinds of first six month numbers of the TOP TIER ‘STACKERS.
He lays out a few reasons for why things didn’t work out as well as he’d hoped on Substack. (One is that he failed to do enough “grievance blogging.”) A couple more that caught our eye:
I’m not a trade publication and not niche enough. Many of the best, most profitable newsletters are based off a very legible beat of some kind. They’re obsessive on one thing or act as a new style of trade publication. Their value is very clear to subscribers and, if you pick a niche where people can expense you for their jobs…giddy up!
I reached my Twitter promotion ceiling. This varies by the Substackers I’ve talked to but my experience is somewhat similar to what Casey Newton wrote recently. A lot of my paid subscriber growth came after getting Twitter shares. If there’s one thing that I don’t love about my personal Substack experience, it was that it still seemed to be anchored to Twitter, a platform that I owe so much to and have just the grimmest feelings about. Alas.
A subscriber’s open rate, Warzel found, didn’t line up with their willingness to pay.
A lot of the people who opened my emails the most did not pay for the newsletter … A lot of the people who paid for the very expensive ‘Founding Member’ subscription tier hardly ever opened the emails. One billionaire signed up for Galaxy Brain early on and then…like…a day later disabled their email. Curious!
Warzel, who reported “modest” growth every single month and a subscription churn around 3%, also wondered if he’s not pulling the plug a little too early. “There’s an argument to be made that if I was very patient for a few years, I could be sitting atop a one person (or multiple person) newsletter empire, making more than my market value at any publication,” he noted. “I think this is possible!”
Since leaving Uber a year ago, in October 2020, I’ve been making a living from writing – one with comparable income to when I was employed.
None of this would have happened if I did not start to write this blog several years ago. Writing which helped hone my writing skills, and build the credibility to start publishing books, and to start my weekly newsletter.
How do you find the inspiration and motivation to write? This is a question I frequently get – especially that regular blogging has led to making a living off writing. Here are the 12 approaches and steps that worked for me – some of which might be useful if you’d like to write more regularly.
1. Own Your Content
Start a blog or a place where you can start share your longform writing.
I am personally a fan for paying out of pocket for the writing platform I use. By doing so, I own my content. I took this advice from software engineer and blogger Scott Hanselman after reading his post Your words are wasted where he writes:
And still you tweet giving all your life’s precious remaining keystrokes to a company and a service that doesn’t love or care about you – to a service that can’t even find a tweet you wrote a month ago.
I pay a monthly fee of around $30 to use Ghost as a hosted service. Paying every month reminds me that I should write something to not waste all this money. It’s a small thing, but this guilt is what helped me get more articles out in the early days.
Getting started on free places where you keep your copyright like Hashnode or Dev.to can also be an option. The nice thing about them is you might get better reach, and more feedback or comments.
The downside with free-to-write platforms is that you don’t really own your content: those companies make a business directly or indirectly monetizing your writing and the traffic it generates. For example, see what happened with Medium: much of the content hosted there is paywalled.
2. Start Writing – Regularly
Few people know, but I have been blogging on another blog for years. Those posts were irregular braindumps on whatever was on my mind. It was a mix of personal updates, debugging stories and sharing when I released a new version of my app.
In 2015, I decided I want to write about software engineering – a field I had been working in for years. I took my inspiration from the once-very-successful Coding Horror blog by Stack Overflow cofounder Jeff Atwood. In the post How to achieve ultimate blog success in one easy step, Jeff wrote:
When people ask me for advice on blogging, I always respond with yet another form of the same advice: pick a schedule you can live with, and stick to it. Until you do that, none of the other advice I could give you will matter. I don’t care if you suck at writing. I don’t care if nobody reads your blog. I don’t care if you have nothing interesting to say. If you can demonstrate a willingness to write, and a desire to keep continually improving your writing, you will eventually be successful.
I read, re-read, and re-read this post. I then decided this is exactly what I need to do.
I picked a schedule and stuck with it for months. I decided to write an article every two weeks for the next couple of months. And this is what I did, shipping the first few articles on this blog:
If I started writing today, I’d join a community like Blogging For Devs, where you have a community that can feel it keeps you accountable, and a group that gives feedback on your early drafts. I’m a paying member here and drop in when I have the time.
Ship 30 for 30 is another great way to start. This is a program where you ship 30 writing assignments in 30 days as part of a cohort that keeps you accountable, which kicstarts this process and helps form this habit. The course is priced around $300: paying this amount and working in a cohort I’d expect will help you stick with writing through the 30 days.
3. Write For Yourself
When I (re)started my blog, I was wondering who would be reading my articles. In the end, I decided I don’t care: I’ll just write them for myself, as a reflection of the ideas and observations I have come across.
Approaching writing with this approach, it has been surprisingly therapeutic and a tool that helps me reflect. Writing my ideas down, in a form that makes sense requires a surprisingly large amount of thinking.
Writing is a forced way to think more clearly – and I’m not the only one to make this realization. Early Facebook employee Andrew “Boz” Bosworth shares a similar observation in the article Writing is thinking:
Even when I write for my own benefit, it is undoubtedly a bonus that at the end I have a document which I can easily share to invite critiques or enlist support. I know of no more scalable way to engage a large audience than the written word.
I’m glad I started out writing for myself: it helped my thinking, and it helped polish my writing as well. The early articles are noticeably shorter and, less pleasant to read, though they often took more time to write than later ones. They gave me early practice in forming and writing down my thoughts around various engineering topics though.
4. Copy Writing Styles You Like
Most of my favourite writers and bloggers have a distinct style. When I started writing, this made me think: what would be my style? What writing setup should I chose?
When starting out, I copied the writing style and approach of well-known bloggers. Most of my early posts were inspired by the quotation style that Jeff Atwood uses in many of his articles. He takes a 1-3 quotes from various articles on the same topic, then adds his own cents.
As I browsed blogs, this approach struck me as one that can help me get started easier. Commenting on someone else’s writing is a lot easier than writing from scratch. So this is what I did with my first few articles. If you look closely, the resemblance in style for these articles should be clear – but only if you know where to look for the inspiration:
Many early Pragmatic Engineer articles were inspired by the writing style of Coding Horror. Can you see the similarities?
As you start to write more, your writing style will evolve and you won’t feel the need to “copy” another style. This is what happened in my case. Current articles don’t lean on any one style: they’re a mix of what I have found pleasant and useful, over the years.
If you like this style – you’re more than welcome to copy the approach. I do, however, recommend the quoting approach for an easy start: it’s much easier for words to flow when there’s already a few thoughts from someone else that you can reflect on.
5. Capture Ideas As They Appear
Once I started writing, the biggest barrier I faced was the lack of ideas. After finishing an article, I’d be unsure what to write about next.
Capturing ideas as they popped into my head has been very helpful for my writing I almost always did this with a note taking app on my phone or my laptop – as ideas would often come when debating with a colleague, or having a conversation over lunch. I now use Craft Docs to capture these – both because of the slick UI, as well because my brother is behind the company – but any system works.
Once I started to capture these ideas as they hit me, I no longer had a shortage of topics. After a while, I had the opposite: too much to choose from. Here’s a screenshot of my “blog ideas” note in Craft Docs, and a fraction of my idea backlog:
6. Freewrite
Once you have the idea, it’s easy to get stuck on an empty page. One of the tricks that helps me break this block is to do twenty minutes of free writing. Here’s how I do it:
I set a timer for 20 minutes on my phone, and place it next to me.
I proceed to do free writing, typing out everything that is in my head. I don’t stop to correct grammatical errors, or to go back and fix anything.
I don’t stop to criticize my thoughts – this gets easier once you’ve done this a few times.
If I cannot think of anything to write, I write “I cannot think anything to write… okay, now I thought of this new idea on…”
The interesting thing is how it works, every time. After a few minutes I’m pushing out ideas, and I’m usually frantically typing when the timer goes off.
7. Draft
Following free writing, I have a good chunk of ideas. I then proceed to write a draft piece.
My approach is this:
I write out key ideas I want to explore as bullets
I write out each of those bullet ideas: either by copying from my free writing, or by adding a few paragraphs to each
I personally like to bold out the key ideas I’m exploring. It helps me focus on what I’m trying to say.
I often do research during the draft stage, reading up on topics I’m writing about, then quoting or linking to relevant resources.
My draft is complete when I wrote about all the parts I wanted to.
8. Edit
Once a draft is ready is when a very different staging of writing comes: editing. This one is something I often leave for the next day. Even when I start doing it after the draft, I take a break to get into “editing mode”.
Editing is about making this piece digestible for the reader. I do a few things:
1. Add a closing section. What is the takeaway of the piece? What is the one, or two things I should leave the reader with? For example, in the article Data structures & algorithms I used working at tech companies, I added this summary section:
Data structures and algorithms are a tool that you should use with confidence when building software. Know these tools, and you’ll be familiar with navigating codebases that use them. You’ll also be far more confident in how to implement solutions to hard problems. You’ll know the theoretical limits, the optimizations you can make, and you’ll come up with solutions that are as good as they get – all tradeoffs considered.
2. Make the opening count. The first few paragraphs need to grab the attention of the reader, make it clear why the topic is relevant, and what they’ll get out of it. I often set the context in the beginning as well.
Do you actually use data structures and algorithms on your day to day job? I’ve noticed a growing trend of people assuming algorithms are pointless questions that are asked by tech companies purely as an arbitrary measure. I hear more people complain about how all of this is a purely academic exercise. (…)
This article is a set of real-world examples where data structures like trees, graphs, and various algorithms were used in production. I hope to illustrate that a generic data structures and algorithms knowledge is not “just for the interview” – but something that you’d likely find yourself reaching for when working at fast-growing, innovative tech companies.
3. Tighten up the text. Once the opening and the closing are clear, I go through the article to tighten up the text, make sentences shorter, and fix any grammatical issues.
In the past, I used Hemingway Editor to spot overly complex sentences. I would then proceed to make them shorter and easier to read. Over time, I learned to write more clear sentences myself:
Making text easier to read with Hemingway Editor: before and after
I also use Grammarly to catch spelling, and grammar issues, and sometimes take suggestions the tool gives – though I just as frequently reject them.
An editor not only makes your writing more clear, but it’s a fantastic way to learn on how you can improve it. I would not recommend an editor for every blog post: but hire one if you’re serious about wanting to write better. My editor is Dominic Grover and I could not be happier with how he helps me write better:
9. Publish
Pressing the button to make my writing live is one I like to delay. However, I’ve always found that done is better than perfect. Most of my blog posts go out after light edits, and I set it live.
10. Feedback
For most of my early posts, I got no feedback, and probably very few readers. However, as soon as I start to get feedback, I often go back and tweak my writing based on what people say.
The most frequent feedback I used to get was on typos. I sometimes do get corrections, and additional ideas, mostly as emails or messages – both are more common since more people read what I have written.
11. Audience
Writing and people reading your writing is a chicken-and-egg problem. When you start out, there’s no one to read. When there’s no one to read, there’s little point in writing.
As uncomfortable as it is, you do need to share your writing to where interested people could be. This can be social media like Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. It can be groups like subreddits, Hacker News and other tech forums. It can be chat groups on Discord or Slack.
Self-promotion is something you’ll need to be wary of on forums: if you only join these communities for the sake of sending a link to your article, you will – rightfully – not be welcome at these places.
This is where it’s helpful when you start to write for yourself: you have less of a pressure to want to get people you don’t know read your writing.
12. Again. And again. And again.
The hard thing about writing is not on publishing an article: anyone can do this. The hard part is doing the writing on a consistent basis.
I found that setting up dedicated time – an hour each week, on a weekday – helped me get into the habit of writing. This is how I wrote most of the posts on this blog.
Over time, some posts resonated with people, while others saw very little interest. Still, every piece helped one person: me. Every time I published, I had the satisfaction that I’ve understood or explained something for myself – and maybe, for others as well.
And this satisfaction is what gave me the motivation to do it again. And again. And again.
