Month: September 2024

Consider the early days of the internet, when websites like NBC News and Amazon cluttered their pages with flashing banners and labyrinthine menus. In the early 2000s, Steve Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think arrived like a lighthouse in a storm, advocating for simplicity and user-centric design.

Today’s digital world is flooded with choices, information, and data, which is both exciting and overwhelming. Unlike Krug’s time, today, the problem isn’t interaction complexity but opacity. AI-powered solutions often lack transparency and explainability, raising concerns about user trust and accountability. The era of click-and-command is fading, giving way to a more seamless and intelligent relationship between humans and machines.

Expanding on Krug’s Call for Clarity: The Pillars of Anticipatory Design

Krug’s emphasis on clarity in design is more relevant than ever. In anticipatory design, clarity is not just about simplicity or ease of use — it’s about transparency and accountability. These two pillars are crucial but often missing as businesses navigate this new paradigm. Users today find themselves in a digital landscape that is not only confusing but increasingly intrusive. AI predicts their desires based on past behavior but rarely explains how these predictions are made, leading to growing mistrust.

Transparency is the foundation of clarity. It involves openly communicating how AI-driven decisions are made, what data is being collected, and how it is being used to anticipate needs. By demystifying these processes, designers can alleviate user concerns about privacy and control, thereby building trust.

Accountability complements transparency by ensuring that anticipatory systems are designed with ethical considerations in mind. This means creating mechanisms for users to understand, question, and override automated decisions if needed. When users feel that the system is accountable to them, their trust in the technology — and the brand — deepens.

What Makes a Service Anticipatory?

Image AI like a waiter at a restaurant. Without AI, they wait for you to interact with them and place your order. But with anticipatory design powered by AI and ML, the waiter can analyze your past orders (historical data) and current behavior (contextual data) — perhaps, by noticing you always start with a glass of sparkling water.

This proactive approach has evolved since the late 1990s, with early examples like Amazon’s recommendation engine and TiVo’s predictive recording. These pioneering services demonstrated the potential of predictive analytics and ML to create personalized, seamless user experiences.

Amazon’s Recommendation Engine (Late 1990s)

Amazon was a pioneer in using data to predict and suggest products to customers, setting the standard for personalized experiences in e-commerce.

TiVo (1999)

TiVo’s ability to learn users’ viewing habits and automatically record shows marked an early step toward predictive, personalized entertainment.

Netflix’s Recommendation System (2006)

Netflix began offering personalized movie recommendations based on user ratings and viewing history in 2006. It helped popularize the idea of anticipatory design in the digital entertainment space.

How Businesses Can Achieve Anticipatory Design

Designing for anticipation is designing for a future that is not here yet but has already started moving toward us.

Designing for anticipation involves more than reacting to current trends; it requires businesses to plan strategically for future user needs. Two critical concepts in this process are forecasting and backcasting.

• Forecasting analyzes past trends and data to predict future outcomes, helping businesses anticipate user needs.
• Backcasting starts with a desired future outcome and works backward to identify the steps needed to achieve that goal.

Think of it like planning a dream vacation. Forecasting would involve looking at your past trips to guess where you might go next. But backcasting lets you pick your ideal destination first, then plan the perfect itinerary to get you there.

Forecasting: A Core Concept for Future-Oriented Design

This method helps in planning and decision-making based on probable future scenarios. Consider Netflix, which uses forecasting to analyze viewers’ past viewing habits and predict what they might want to watch next. By leveraging data from millions of users, Netflix can anticipate individual preferences and serve personalized recommendations that keep users engaged and satisfied.

Backcasting: Planning From the Desired Future

Backcasting takes a different approach. Instead of using data to predict the future, it starts with defining a desired future outcome — a clear user intent. The process then works backward to identify the steps needed to achieve that goal. This goal-oriented approach crafts an experience that actively guides users toward their desired future state.

For instance, a financial planning app might start with a user’s long-term financial goal, such as saving for retirement, and then design an experience that guides the user through each step necessary to reach that goal, from budgeting tips to investment recommendations.

Integrating Forecasting and Backcasting In Anticipatory Design

The true power of anticipatory design emerges when businesses efficiently integrate both forecasting and backcasting into their design processes.

For example, Tesla’s approach to electric vehicles exemplifies this integration. By forecasting market trends and user preferences, Tesla can introduce features that appeal to users today. Simultaneously, by backcasting from a vision of a sustainable future, Tesla designs its vehicles and infrastructure to guide society toward a world where electric cars are the norm and carbon emissions are significantly reduced.

Over-Promising and Under-Delivering: The Pitfalls of Anticipatory Design

As businesses increasingly adopt anticipatory design, the integration of forecasting and backcasting becomes essential. Forecasting allows businesses to predict and respond to immediate user needs, while backcasting ensures these responses align with long-term goals. Despite its potential, anticipatory design often fails in execution, leaving few examples of success.

Over the past decade, I’ve observed and documented the rise and fall of several ambitious anticipatory design ventures. Among them, three — Digit, LifeBEAM Vi Sense Headphones, and Mint — highlight the challenges of this approach.

Digit: Struggling with Contextual Understanding

Digit aimed to simplify personal finance with algorithms that automatically saved money based on user spending. However, the service often missed the mark, lacking the contextual awareness necessary to accurately assess users’ real-time financial situations. This led to unexpected withdrawals, frustrating users, especially those living paycheck to paycheck. The result was a breakdown in trust, with the service feeling more intrusive than supportive.

LifeBEAM Vi Sense Headphones: Complexity and User Experience Challenges

LifeBEAM Vi Sense Headphones was marketed as an AI-driven fitness coach, promising personalized guidance during workouts. In practice, the AI struggled to deliver tailored coaching, offering generic and unresponsive advice. As a result, users found the experience difficult to navigate, ultimately limiting the product’s appeal and effectiveness. This disconnection between the promised personalized experience and the actual user experience left many disappointed.

Mint: Misalignment with User Goals

Mint aimed to empower users to manage their finances by providing automated budgeting tools and financial advice. While the service had the potential to anticipate user needs, users often found that the suggestions were not tailored to their unique financial situations, resulting in generic advice that did not align with their personal goals.

The lack of personalized, actionable steps led to a mismatch between user expectations and service delivery. This misalignment caused some users to disengage, feeling that Mint was not fully attuned to their unique financial journeys.

The Risks of Over-promising and Under-Delivering

The stories of Digit, LifeBEAM Vi Sense, and Mint underscore a common pitfall: over-promising and under-delivering. These services focused too much on predictive power and not enough on user experience. When anticipatory systems fail to consider individual nuances, they breed frustration rather than satisfaction, highlighting the importance of aligning design with human experience.

Digit’s approach to automated savings, for instance, became problematic when users found its decisions opaque and unpredictable. Similarly, LifeBEAM’s Vi Sense headphones struggled to meet diverse user needs, while Mint’s rigid tools failed to offer the personalized insights users expected. These examples illustrate the delicate balance anticipatory design must strike between proactive assistance and user control.

Failure to Evolve with User Needs

Many anticipatory services rely heavily on data-driven forecasting, but predictions can fall short without understanding the broader user context. Mint initially provided value with basic budgeting tools but failed to evolve with users’ growing needs for more sophisticated financial advice. Digit, too, struggled to adapt to different financial habits, leading to dissatisfaction and limited success.

Complexity and Usability Issues

Balancing the complexity of predictive systems with usability and transparency is a key challenge in anticipatory design.

When systems become overly complex, as seen with LifeBEAM Vi Sense headphones, users may find them difficult to navigate or control, compromising trust and engagement. Mint’s generic recommendations, born from a failure to align immediate user needs with long-term goals, further illustrate the risks of complexity without clarity.

Privacy and Trust Issues

Trust is critical in anticipatory design, particularly in services handling sensitive data like finance or health. Digit and Mint both encountered trust issues as users grew skeptical of how decisions were made and whether these services truly had their best interests in mind. Without clear communication and control, even the most sophisticated systems risk alienating users.

Inadequate Handling of Edge Cases and Unpredictable Scenarios

While forecasting and backcasting work well for common scenarios, they can struggle with edge cases or unpredictable user behaviors. If an anticipatory service can’t handle these effectively, it risks providing a poor user experience and, in the worst-case scenario, harming the user. Anticipatory systems must be prepared to handle edge cases and unpredictable scenarios.

LifeBEAM Vi Sense headphones struggled when users deviated from expected fitness routines, offering a one-size-fits-all experience that failed to adapt to individual needs. This highlights the importance of allowing users control, even when a system proactively assists them.

Designing for Anticipatory Experiences

Anticipatory design should empower users to achieve their goals, not just automate tasks.

We can follow a layered approach to plan a service that can evolve according to user actions and explicit ever-evolving intent.

But how do we design for intent without misaligning anticipation and user control or mismatching user expectations and service delivery?

At the core of this approach is intent — the primary purpose or goal that the design must achieve. Surrounding this are workflows, which represent the structured tasks to achieve the intent. Finally, algorithms analyze user data and optimize these workflows.

For instance, Thrive (see the image below), a digital wellness platform, aligns algorithms and workflows with the core intent of improving well-being. By anticipating user needs and offering personalized programs, Thrive helps users achieve sustained behavior change.

It perfectly exemplifies the three-layered concentric representation for achieving behavior change through anticipatory design:

1. Innermost layer: Intent

Improve overall well-being: Thrive’s core intent is to help users achieve a healthier and more fulfilling life. This encompasses aspects like managing stress, improving sleep quality, and boosting energy levels.

2. Middle layer: Workflows

Personalized programs and support: Thrive uses user data (sleep patterns, activity levels, mood) to create programs tailored to their specific needs and goals. These programs involve various workflows, such as:

• Guided meditations and breathing exercises to manage stress and anxiety.
• Personalized sleep routines aimed at improving sleep quality.
• Educational content and coaching tips to promote healthy habits and lifestyle changes.

3. Outermost layer: Algorithms

Data analysis and personalized recommendations: Thrive utilizes algorithms to analyze user data and generate actionable insights. These algorithms perform tasks like the following:

• Identify patterns in sleep, activity, and mood to understand user challenges.
• Predict user behavior to recommend interventions that address potential issues.
• Optimize program recommendations based on user progress and data analysis.

By aligning algorithms and workflows with the core intent of improving well-being, Thrive provides a personalized and proactive approach to behavior change. Here’s how it benefits users:

• Sustained behavior change: Personalized programs and ongoing support empower users to develop healthy habits for the long term.
• Data-driven insights: User data analysis helps users gain valuable insights into their well-being and identify areas for improvement.
• Proactive support: Anticipates potential issues and recommends interventions before problems arise.

The Future of Anticipatory Design: Combining Anticipation with Foresight

Anticipatory design is inherently future-oriented, making it both appealing and challenging. To succeed, businesses must combine anticipation — predicting future needs — with foresight, a systematic approach to analyzing and preparing for future changes.

Foresight involves considering alternative future scenarios and making informed decisions to navigate toward desired outcomes. For example, Digit and Mint struggled because they didn’t adequately handle edge cases or unpredictable scenarios, a failure in their foresight strategy (see an image below).

As mentioned, while forecasting and backcasting work well for common scenarios, they can struggle with edge cases or unpredictable user behaviors. Under anticipatory design, if we demote foresight for a second plan, the business will fail to account for and prepare for emerging trends and disruptive changes. Strategic foresight helps companies to prepare for the future and develop strategies to address possible challenges and opportunities.

The Foresight process generally involves interrelated activities, including data research, trend analysis, planning scenarios, and impact assessment. The ultimate goal is to gain a broader and deeper understanding of the future to make more informed and strategic decisions in the design process and foresee possible frictions and pitfalls in the user experience.

Actionable Insights for Designer

• Enhance contextual awareness
  Help data scientists or engineers to ensure that the anticipatory systems can understand and respond to the full context of user needs, not just historical data. Plan for pitfalls so you can design safety measures where the user can control the system.
• Maintain user control
  Provide users with options to customize or override automated decisions, ensuring they feel in control of their experiences.
• Align short-term predictions with long-term goals
  Use forecasting and backcasting to create a balanced approach that meets immediate needs while guiding users toward their long-term objectives.

Proposing an Anticipatory Design Framework

Predicting the future is no easy task. However, design can borrow foresight techniques to imagine, anticipate, and shape a future where technology seamlessly integrates with users evolving needs. To effectively implement anticipatory design, it’s essential to balance human control with AI automation. Here’s a 3-step approach to integrate future thinking into your workflow:

1. Anticipate Directions of Change
   Identify major trends shaping the future.
2. Imagine Alternative Scenarios
   Explore potential futures to guide impactful design decisions.
3. Shape Our Choices
   Leverage these scenarios to align design with user needs and long-term goals.

This proposed framework (see an image above) aims to integrate forecasting and backcasting while emphasizing user intent, transparency, and continuous improvement, ensuring that businesses create experiences that are both predictive and deeply aligned with user needs.

Step 1: Anticipate Directions of Change

Objective: Identify the major trends and forces shaping the future landscape.

Components:

1. Understand the User’s Intent

• User Research: Conduct in-depth user research through interviews, surveys, and observations to uncover user goals, motivations, pain points, and long-term aspirations or Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD). This foundational step helps clearly define the user’s intent.
• Persona Development: Develop detailed user personas that represent the target audience, including their long-term goals and desired outcomes. Prioritize understanding how the service can adapt in real-time to changing user needs, offering recommendations, or taking actions aligned with the persona’s current context.

2. Forecasting: Predicting Near-Term User Needs

• Data Collection and Analysis: Collaborate closely with data scientists and data engineers to analyze historical data (past interactions), user behavior, and external factors. This collaboration ensures that predictive analytics enhance overall user experience, allowing designers to better understand the implications of data on user behaviors.
• Predictive Modeling: Implement continuous learning algorithms that refine predictions over time. Regularly assess how these models evolve, adapting to users’ changing needs and circumstances.
• Explore the Delphi Method: This is a structured communication technique that gathers expert opinions to reach a consensus on future developments. It’s particularly useful for exploring complex issues with uncertain outcomes. Use the Delphi Method to gather insights from industry experts, user researchers, and stakeholders about future user needs and the best strategies to meet those needs. The consensus achieved can help in clearly defining the long-term goals and desired outcomes.

Activities:

• Conduct interviews and workshops with experts using the Delphi Method to validate key trends.
• Analyze data and trends to forecast future directions.

Step 2: Imagine Alternative Scenarios

Objective: Explore a range of potential futures based on these changing directions.

Components:

1. Scenario Planning

• Scenario Development: It involves creating detailed, plausible future scenarios based on various external factors, such as technological advancements, social trends, and economic changes. Develop multiple future scenarios that represent different possible user contexts and their impact on their needs.
• Scenario Analysis: From these scenarios, you can outline the long-term goals that users might have in each scenario and design services that anticipate and address these needs. Assess how these scenarios impact user needs and experiences.

2. Backcasting: Designing from the Desired Future

• Define Desired Outcomes: Clearly outline the long-term goals or future states that users aim to achieve. Use backcasting to reduce cognitive load by designing a service that anticipates future needs, streamlining user interactions, and minimizing decision-making efforts.
  • Use Visioning Planning: This is a creative process that involves imagining the ideal future state you want to achieve. It helps in setting clear, long-term goals by focusing on the desired outcomes rather than current constraints. Facilitate workshops or brainstorming sessions with stakeholders to co-create a vision of the future. Define what success looks like from the user’s perspective and use this vision to guide the backcasting process.
• Identify Steps to Reach Goals: Reverse-engineer the user journey by starting from the desired future state and working backward. Identify the necessary steps and milestones and ensure these are communicated transparently to users, allowing them control over their experience.
• Create Roadmaps: Develop detailed roadmaps that outline the sequence of actions needed to transition from the current state to the desired future state. These roadmaps should anticipate obstacles, respect privacy, and avoid manipulative behaviors, empowering users rather than overwhelming them.

Activities:

• Develop and analyze alternative scenarios to explore various potential futures.
• Use backcasting to create actionable roadmaps from these scenarios, ensuring they align with long-term goals.

Step 3: Shape Our Choices

Objective: Leverage these scenarios to spark new ideas and guide impactful design decisions.

Components:

1. Integrate into the Human-Centered Design Process

• Iterative Design with Forecasting and Backcasting: Embed insights from forecasting and backcasting into every stage of the design process. Use these insights to inform user research, prototype development, and usability testing, ensuring that solutions address both predicted future needs and desired outcomes. Continuously refine designs based on user feedback.
• Agile Methodologies: Adopt agile development practices to remain flexible and responsive. Ensure that the service continuously learns from user interactions and feedback, refining its predictions and improving its ability to anticipate needs.

2. Implement and Monitor: Ensuring Ongoing Relevance

• User Feedback Loops: Establish continuous feedback mechanisms to refine predictive models and workflows. Use this feedback to adjust forecasts and backcasted plans as necessary, keeping the design aligned with evolving user expectations.
• Automation Tools: Collaborate with data scientists and engineers to deploy automation tools that execute workflows and monitor progress toward goals. These tools should adapt based on new data, evolving alongside user behavior and emerging trends.
• Performance Metrics: Define key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the effectiveness, accuracy, and quality of the anticipatory experience. Regularly review these metrics to ensure that the system remains aligned with intended outcomes.
• Continuous Improvement: Maintain a cycle of continuous improvement where the system learns from each interaction, refining its predictions and recommendations over time to stay relevant and useful.
  • Use Trend Analysis: This involves identifying and analyzing patterns in data over time to predict future developments. This method helps you understand the direction in which user behaviors, technologies, and market conditions are heading. Use trend analysis to identify emerging trends that could influence user needs in the future. This will inform the desired outcomes by highlighting what users might require or expect from a service as these trends evolve.

Activities:

• Implement design solutions based on scenario insights and iterate based on user feedback.
• Regularly review and adjust designs using performance metrics and continuous improvement practices.

Conclusion: Navigating the Future of Anticipatory Design

Anticipatory design holds immense potential to revolutionize user experiences by predicting and fulfilling needs before they are even articulated. However, as seen in the examples discussed, the gap between expectation and execution can lead to user dissatisfaction and erode trust.

To navigate the future of anticipatory design successfully, businesses must prioritize transparency, accountability, and user empowerment. By enhancing contextual awareness, maintaining user control, and aligning short-term predictions with long-term goals, companies can create experiences that are not only innovative but also deeply resonant with their users’ needs.

Moreover, combining anticipation with foresight allows businesses to prepare for a range of future scenarios, ensuring that their designs remain relevant and effective even as circumstances change. The proposed 3-step framework — anticipating directions of change, imagining alternative scenarios, and shaping our choices — provides a practical roadmap for integrating these principles into the design process.

As we move forward, the challenge will be to balance the power of AI with the human need for clarity, control, and trust. By doing so, businesses can fulfill the promise of anticipatory design, creating products and services that are not only efficient and personalized but also ethical and user-centric.

In the end,

The success of anticipatory design will depend on its ability to enhance, rather than replace, the human experience.

It is a tool to empower users, not to dictate their choices. When done right, anticipatory design can lead to a future where technology seamlessly integrates with our lives, making everyday experiences simpler, more intuitive, and ultimately more satisfying.

Gain $200 in a week
from Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers https://ift.tt/7Wt509u

An educated workforce is a happier workforce. That’s why it makes sense to invest in corporate training and eLearning. It’ll increase the skills, creativity and innovation of your workforce and help you keep more employees, too.

One key tool in delivering training is the presentation. Get your presentation right, and you can present important information and engage your audience.

To build presentations fast, you can use premium corporate training PowerPoint templates. You’ll find lots of free and premium training PowerPoint templates and other elearning templates across the web. In this article, we’ll share some of the best training PowerPoint templates to help you make appealing presentations.

Business Training PowerPoint Infographics

This is a useful PowerPoint template for facilitating business training sessions. With over 20 unique, fully customizable infographic slides, it offers a modern, user-friendly approach to crafting informative presentations to accompany your business training and seminars.

Bentala – Employee Training PowerPoint Template

Another modern PowerPoint template perfect for business training slides. With a modern, sleek design and user-friendly interface, it’s easy for anyone to produce impressive, professional-looking presentations. It includes 20 editable slides, drag-and-drop image functionality, and customizable color schemes.

Team Building Training PowerPoint Template

This PowerPoint template is also suitable for training sessions, which can enhance your presentations with its sleek, modern design. Its features include 10 master slides, editable vector graphics, and a convenient drag-and-drop feature for image placement.

Online Course PowerPoint Template

This is a thoughtfully crafted PowerPoint template for educators and online course creators. Designed for clarity and visual appeal, this comprehensive template can brilliantly outline course content, learning objectives, instructor qualifications, and enrolment details.

Team Building & Training Powerpoint Template

This is a sleek, modern PowerPoint template ideal for professional business presentations. Whether you’re pitching a startup, proposing a project, or conducting leadership training, this template is versatile, fitted with 25 editable slides and drag-drop image placeholders.

Modern Online Course Powerpoint Template

A multipurpose business presentation template, perfect for webinars, e-courses, online seminars, and much more. With its clean and professional design complemented by 36 editable slides, resizable graphics, and drag-and-drop image placeholders, it’s suitable for a variety of uses.

Lumiere – Education Course Presentation Template

The Lumiere is a versatile PowerPoint template for various purposes such as education, coursework, technology, corporate pitches, digital marketing, start-up projects, and personal portfolios. The template’s features include 30 unique slides, editable graphics, free web fonts, and more.

e-Learning College Powerpoint Template

This is a top-tier, engaging PowerPoint template tailored for educators and academic administrators. It’s ideal for presenting online learning programs at academic conferences, introducing online courses, or hosting educational workshops. This template’s professional design, high-quality graphics, and easy customization make it a great choice for anyone wishing to highlight the features and benefits of eLearning.

Human Resource Training PowerPoint Template

Take your business presentations to the next level with this PowerPoint template. Boasting 30+ unique slides in a widescreen 16:9 format, this template is versatile for various projects. With all graphics being resizable and editable, as well as an easy drag-and-drop picture placeholder, you have control over your presentation’s look.

Call Center Training PowerPoint Template

This creative PowerPoint template is a uniquely designed graphic pack to elevate your presentation experience. It comes with editable charts and elements, preset color schemes, and diverse slide variations. Convenient and user-friendly, this template is ideal for illustrating every stage of your business development journey.

Employee Training Plan PowerPoint Template

An impressive and user-friendly PowerPoint template designed to heighten business training presentations. With its unique, editable slides and preset color scheme, the template facilitates the creation of comprehensive presentations for every stage of business development.

Online Course Education Presentation

This is a customizable PowerPoint template perfect for educational needs. It features a 16:9 widescreen ratio, a user-friendly master slide layout, and a complimentary font. The Eduwave template style is flexible and well-suited for both corporate and personal presentations.

Lovanda – Language Course PowerPoint Template

An elegant and comprehensive PowerPoint template that helps transform your creative visions into polished realities with ease. This versatile template, perfect for numerous creative enterprises, allows you to brilliantly communicate your ideas with its 10 customizable slides, retina and full HD resolution, resizable vector elements, and more.

Business Training PowerPoint Presentation

Use this PowerPoint template to streamline the creation of your slideshows, whether it’s for business training sessions or seminars. It comes equipped with editable color schemes, image placeholders, and free font, helping to elevate your content without effort.

Leadership Training PowerPoint Template

This is a modern, professional, and minimalist PowerPoint template perfect for business coaches, motivational speakers, and training companies. It comes with 25 total slides, features resizable and editable graphics, and even includes drag-and-drop image placeholders.

Modern Leadership Training Presentation Template

A cutting-edge PowerPoint template designed for leadership training and business workshops. It includes 30 unique, editable slides with a light background suitable for various seminars, training events, and more.

MasterClass Training PowerPoint Template

A dynamic PowerPoint template for business training presentations. With over 30 unique, editable slides in a 16:9 widescreen format, this template allows for aesthetic coherence through its predetermined color scheme and font theme. It provides a comprehensive approach to project storytelling, catering to every phase of your business growth.

Leadership Training PowerPoint Presentation

With a wide array of customizable, eye-catching slide designs, this PowerPoint template effortlessly meets diverse presentation needs. Its notable features include editable graphics, utilization of free web fonts, master slides-based setup, and a user-friendly drag-and-drop functionality.

Business Training PowerPoint Template

This is a versatile PowerPoint template designed for creating professional and engaging business training presentations. It features a simple and modern theme with editable color scheme, image placeholders, and uses a free font.

Training Interview Presentation for PowerPoint

This is the perfect PowerPoint template for constructing impressive training presentations effortlessly. Suitable for businesses, agencies, and training companies, this template will elevate your training programs in a professional way.

Jobtrain Training PowerPoint Template

Jobtrain PowerPoint template combines various design aspects and usability to make your company profile presentation more engaging. Inside the pack, you’ll find a smorgasbord of infographics, vectors, charts, and layouts that you can use inside your presentation.

Learnic – Training PowerPoint Template

This is a well-designed and modern training presentation template. It’s great for teaching and training. The team training template PPT comes with over 100 slides you can work with. You can also use the included maps, charts, and other graphics.

Ronald – Training PowerPoint Template

Roland is a professional, clean, modern, and easy-to-use presentation template. It can be used for various purposes. Roland offers you amazing convenience in terms of replacing images and fonts. Make your clients feel satisfied with this presentation template.

Time Management Training PowerPoint Template

This is one of the best PowerPoint templates for training, thanks to its crisp, minimalist design. The time management training template set includes 12 PowerPoint files and more than 60 slides. Add the finishing touches to your presentation with built-in icons and handmade infographics.

Yogadu – Training PowerPoint Template

Yogadu is an easy-to-edit set of training PowerPoint templates via drag and drop. The training template set includes 80 different slides and 10 color schemes. There are many different business templates and charts with editable shapes.

Arthur – Training PowerPoint Template

This set of corporate PowerPoint templates includes more than 60 unique training slides. There are editable charts and diagrams, making it easy to include data in your business training. This training PPT is attractive, well-designed and well-supported.

Professional Training PowerPoint Template

This is a responsive PowerPoint training template with a clean, professional design. The template set has more than 50 slides and will match your branding with unlimited colors. It also includes a variety of infographic elements such as charts and timelines, as well as editable vector icons.

Clean Training PowerPoint Template

This PowerPoint training template is a fun contemporary choice for your next presentation. This download comes with 40 unique training slides and layouts. These slides are also easy to edit and customize. Take advantage of the device mockups to help illustrate your points.

eLearning PowerPoint Template

Here’s a cool training presentation focused on education. It comes with unique slide layouts, image placeholders, and it’s based on master slides. It has plenty of white space, making it easy for your audience to follow your points. This template is perfect for your next training presentation.

Online Education PowerPoint Template

Design your presentation template quickly with this ready-made E-Learning PowerPoint Template. It has many slide layouts to choose from with stock photos and techy graphic design elements. What is the best part? You can redesign this presentation template quickly. You just have to download it, edit the content, and wow our audiences.

Versatile Training PowerPoint Template

This PowerPoint training template set is designed for online courses. It’s got an eye-catching design and includes animations. There are 51 training slides in the set. It’s easy to change colors to match your chosen color scheme with a single click. Free eLearning templates for PowerPoint usually don’t have these features.

Webinar & Ecourse PowerPoint Template

This template for Microsoft PowerPoint is a modern and sleek presentation that will give a boost to your business meetings and lectures. It contains 46 beautifully designed slides that can be easily edited and adjusted to suit all of your professional and business needs.

Online Training PowerPoint Template

This simple, elegant eLearning PowerPoint template has a clean design to suit any kind of training. It includes 50 slides that are designed and easy to edit with drag and drop. The training template PPT includes vector icons.

Online Class PowerPoint Template

This training PowerPoint presentation template will help you deliver in an online classroom. The slide deck’s layout is minimal and stylish. University also includes more than 42 unique training slides. Features like image placeholders and master slides make this an easy template to customize. It’s hard to find a training PPT template free download that can say that.

Online Training Course PowerPoint Template

Now you don’t need to spend time preparing complicated slides. Just download this presentation and replace text and images in a few clicks. It provides you with more time preparing your speech.

Elearn – Training PowerPoint Template

This training PowerPoint template comes with 16 slides. It also includes infographic elements. Use it for business training or eLearning.

iCourse – Training PowerPoint Template

This training and development PPT template is great for many subjects. If your training relates to sketching or designing, the slide templates are already set up.

Hi- Learning – Training PowerPoint Template

If you need to talk timelines, this training presentation template has the graphics you need already built in. All you’ve got to do is edit the included example, and you’re good to go.

Professional Training PowerPoint Template

This is another free Microsoft Office template featuring images of education. It’s simple to edit fonts and colors to make the training template PPT your own.

Laqu – Training PowerPoint Template

Laqu is a simple training PowerPoint template with a dark background. The dark background is suitable for many purposes, including corporate training. This technical training PPT includes 25 editable slides.

The wild ride of AI is still on, and industries across the globe are riding it for growth. But concerns are also mounting.

For one, professionals continue to question AI’s impact on their work. This is especially true for many marketers and content creators, such as myself, who are keen to understand the role of AI in content marketing.

With the global revenue for AI in marketing pegged at over $107.5 billion by 2028, there is no doubt that AI will soon (and may already) be an integral part of the digital marketing landscape.

So, for the creator or marketer who wishes to stay ahead of the curve, knowing how to leverage this technology is a no-brainer.

Using the real experiences of marketing professionals and data from our recent State of AI for Marketers survey, I will answer your questions about how creators and marketers are using AI in 2024 and what this means for their output and productivity.

Table of Contents

• What is AI in content marketing?
• Benefits of Using AI in Content Marketing
• How to Use AI in Content Marketing
• AI in Content Marketing Examples
• Will AI replace content creators?

What is AI in content marketing?

While there’s no standard definition of “AI in content marketing,” I will attempt to build one based on the understanding of the two concepts.

Corey Wainwright describes content marketing as a “marketing program that centers on creating, publishing, and distributing content for your target audience — usually online — the goal of which is to attract new customers.”

Google defines AI as “a set of technologies that enable computers to perform a variety of functions, including the ability to see, understand and translate spoken and written language, analyze data, make recommendations, and more.”

Combining these two concepts into one definition for AI in content marketing would look like this:

AI in content marketing involves using technologies that analyze data, understand language, and make recommendations to create, publish, and distribute content designed to engage an online audience.

Benefits of Using AI in Content Marketing

I’ve gathered some of the most popular applications of AI in content marketing, and their benefits are below.

1. Content Creation

In our 2024 State of AI report, 43% of marketers place content creation as the most popular use case of AI in content marketing.

Content can take many forms — written, visual, video, and audio — and marketers are using generative AI to bring these to life at scale.

“As a PR professional working with high-growth SaaS startups and VC firms, AI enables us to craft more personalized stories that resonate deeply with their audiences, drive engagement, and ultimately, build stronger, more credible brands,” Sim Aulakh, founder of PR firm EstablishCred, says.

Benefits: In using generative AI to do anything from writing marketing copy to turning text into video, marketers can save time and increase productivity in the content creation process.

2. Research

Content marketers need to know enough about customers, competitors, and their industry to make confident decisions about the entire pipeline of content production.

AI tools can be quite useful in finding this information and analyzing volumes of data to identify trends, keywords, and relevant information, all in record time.

For example, HubSpot’s new AI Search Grader — a first-of-its-kind, free app that quickly analyzes your brand based on what your prospects and customers are seeing across AI search engines — gives you actionable recommendations on how to improve. Imagine the wonders this would do for any marketing team.

Benefits: Besides saving time and effort, using AI for content marketing research guarantees that decisions are made more quickly and confidently than manual research. Advanced AI models can even extract up-to-date information for more accurate content planning.

3. Brainstorming Content Ideas

I know from personal experience that to be a creative professional is to, among other things, accept the fact that good ideas may elude you once in a while.

With AI, I’ve found this creative block does not need to linger for long as there are tools that will generate or suggest creative concepts that you could tweak to your liking. As a content writer, I personally love having AI as a brainstorming partner when I get stuck.

For Aulakh, whose company undertakes several creative projects, leveraging AI for content brainstorming has been pivotal to their recent growth.

“While human creativity cannot be replaced by AI, it can be enhanced by AI. As an example, AI tools like Gemini and ChatGPT have helped us during brainstorming and ideation processes for content projects. Now, we’re able to deliver on projects at a fraction of the time it used to take us,” he says

Benefits: Brainstorming with AI will not only kickstart your creative engines but also speed up the process. Nearly 82% of the marketers surveyed say that using AI for brainstorming content ideas has saved them at least one hour of their precious time.

4. Data Analysis And Reporting

To learn how content distribution is faring in the market and impacting the business, content marketers need to rely on data analytics.

AI-powered analytics tools evaluate content performance and generate detailed reports on engagement metrics, ROI, and audience behavior.

This is, in fact, the third most popular use case of AI for marketers, according to our survey.

Benefits: Provides data-driven and actionable insights for optimizing content strategies and could also automate reporting. This improves the quality of decisions the marketer makes which, in turn, affects performance positively.

5. Self Upskilling

Ever been in the middle of work and reached a hurdle that only a quick search or YouTube video could help you cross? Well, 41% of the marketers we surveyed have and they say using AI helped them learn how to do those things.

Benefits: Besides the comfort of learning how to solve a problem and doing so in record time, this use case also ensures that marketers remain competitive and knowledgeable in the ever-evolving landscape of marketing.

How to Use AI in Content Marketing

Let’s now test some of the use cases mentioned above.

Without a good idea, it’s impossible to get the content on the road to either attract or engage audiences. So, we’ll start with brainstorming.

Assume I’m a content marketer at HubSpot who needs a cool video idea for distribution on our social media channels.

I found a cool AI brainstorming platform called Ideamap AI and asked it to brainstorm a video content idea for HubSpot, after providing context on what kind of brand HubSpot is. You’ll find that the map it produces is a bit much, considering that I already have trouble deciding what I want to do.

I chose the first idea and used the expand with AI option to generate more ideas or inspiration for marketing content.

One way AI can be used for ideas or inspiration is by creating a mood board with tools like Kive.ai.

Given the sheer range of options for expansion and transformation available, it is nearly impossible not to find something you would be willing to work on.

So, we are creating an animated explainer video showcasing how HubSpot connects marketing, sales, and customer service.

To get accurate information needed for this video, I will need to extract it from the website. This time, I will employ the research abilities of ChatGPT Plus, which can pull real-time information from the internet.

While it does a good job of extracting the information (from six sites), the output is not exactly video material. So, the next step would be to ask it to create the video script, which would kickstart the content creation process.

Since OpenAI’s Sora has still not been released to the public, I had to find available alternatives. It is worth mentioning here that 70% of the marketers we surveyed say they cannot wait to use the new tech.

However, Elai, an intuitive AI video creator, came in handy.

Creating the video with the script ChatGPT helped me create was indeed straightforward, although I must mention that there were not many video editing options to choose from.

Using an avatar, an American voice sample, and a blank background with HubSpot’s brand color were as far as I could go, especially as someone with limited video editing skills.

While I think this attempt was far from flawless, it was a solid effort. With some additional time to refine the details, I believe it has the potential to be even better.

AI in Content Marketing Examples

Generating Ideas & Inspiration: Mateo Toro

There’s an abundance of marketing professionals leveraging AI to boost their productivity and enhance their strategies.

For example, filmmaker and photographer Mateo Toro recently started using Kive.ai to design mood boards to develop treatments for his film projects.

A video treatment is a way to convey a project's concept or story. Many video treatments involve the use of images and visual media found online or in previous works.

“Video treatments take time. You have to scrub through the video, take screenshots, and edit for the video treatment,“ Toro explained. ”[Kive.ai] just makes it so much easier for me to find the video that has a style or tone I'm looking to emulate.”

With Kive.ai, creators can paste the link of a video into the system, and Kive.ai will extract frames from the video as screenshots to import into a board. Toro says the process can save him hours of time.

“In a video treatment, I could be going through 10, 15, 20 videos to reference,“ he said. ”You add that up, and it could easily be an hour of time just scrubbing through, screenshotting, and dragging content to a treatment.”

Writing Copy: Bethany Anderson

Then there’s Bethany Anderson, a public information officer for Milton, Florida, who says ChatGPT streamlines the writing aspect of her job.

“I love it because ChatGPT is a software that learns,” Anderson explains.

She says ChatGPT can mimic her writing style, so she’ll sometimes use the tool to write press releases, social media posts, and SEO-friendly blog content.

Anderson says the tool is handy because writing is a crucial part of her job, but it’s far from the only responsibility she has to tackle daily.

“I am behind the scenes planning events and getting them out to the public,“ she says. ”So, ChatGPT allows me to get the writing done in a very easy, seamless way so that I can get to the bones of my job — which is outreach.”

Anderson admits she was wary of ChatGPT at first but tested it out during a week that was jam-packed with deadlines.

“There was this one week a couple of months ago when I had so many deadlines, so many social media calendars due, so many blogs due, and so many bios due — I was drowning,” she recalls. “So I said, ‘I’m going to give it a try.’”

Days worth of writing assignments could be completed in just a few hours thanks to the assistance of AI, according to Anderson.

Her experience aligns with the findings of our survey — nearly 80% of marketers said generative AI has a positive ROI on their content writing tasks.

“We’re talking about days of your life that you get back,” she said. “And, to me, time is valuable. It's more valuable than money.”

Editing Drafts: Irina Nica

On the other hand, Irina Nica, HubSpot’s Senior Product Marketing Manager, uses HubSpot’s AI Content Writer to edit her drafts.

“It's like having a second pair of eyes that helps me go through my drafts, tidy them up, and get them out there faster. Don’t get me wrong … Writing is a huge part of my job and something that AI can’t take over, but it sure helps to speed up the nitty-gritty bits like editing.”

She also uses ChatSpot, HubSpot’s AI chatbot solution designed to help businesses perform marketing and sales operations, to supercharge her research.

“I like to use ChatSpot for getting quick recommendations for products, books, or any type of resource really. Say I‘m looking for the best product marketing book for SaaS companies; normally, I’d be knee-deep in Google searches, reading articles, and checking out recommendations on Goodreads,” Nica says.

“But with the right prompt, ChatSpot can get me there 10X faster. I still give its final recommendation a quick Google check, but it's a super handy shortcut.”

Will AI replace content creators?

A common concern surrounding the use of AI is whether the technology will replace human marketers and creators. Nima Olumi of Lightyear Strategies says it’s unlikely.

“We use AI to pull a lot of statistics, come up with interesting angles to pitch to companies, and work around certain angles that are marketing and media-friendly,” Olumi said. “I don't think it's a complete replacement for writers or thinkers.”

Writing and content creation are subjective fields, according to Olumi, and they still require people to do the necessary critical thinking to decide the kind of content that gets published.

Ultimately, Olumi predicts a future where AI will assist marketers and creatives in improving their output and producing content in a shorter time.

This makes sense, considering our survey found that 74% of marketers agree that AI tools can help them be more productive in their roles.

Olumi encourages professionals to embrace AI and use it to their advantage rather than shy away.

Specifically, he says creators should spend time learning and testing applications like Open.ai and ChatGPT to see their different capabilities.

“Spend hours asking question after question to see how far you can push the limits of the application to serve your needs,” he said. “You have to feed it context.”

Making the Most of AI

As the presence of AI in marketing continues to grow significantly, I suggest you take the time to discover how it can best serve your own team's needs.

Professionals and creatives like Olumi, Aulakh, Anderson, Nica, and Toro all found ways to use AI to help them improve the efficiency and quality of their content.

Instead of worrying whether the robots will take over, I recommend finding ways to work alongside AI, so you and your company can remain competitive in the market and essential to your clients.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in April 2023 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

If you asked whether technology could replace marketing a few decades ago, most would look at you like you hit your head on concrete. Now, it’s no more a question but an issue that’s sparking industry-wide debate.

And we owe this specifically to the generative AI surge — which has more implications for the creative sector than many others.

But the question is, will AI replace marketers or make us better? And what about SEO? Will Googling be replaced with AI chatbots — and what does all that mean for content creation?

To answer these questions, I spoke with Samyutha Reddy, Jasper’s former Head of Enterprise Marketing, to explore her perspectives on what the future holds for AI in marketing and organic search.

Table of Contents

• How do marketers use AI?
• Why AI Won’t Replace Marketing
• AI is a Tool For Marketers, Not a Replacement
• But what about the search engines?
• So, will marketing be replaced by AI?

How do marketers use AI?

First, let’s consider how generative AI is even used in marketing.

Marketers surveyed in our 2024 State of AI in Marketing revealed the major tasks they use AI for. Top on that list are content creation, research, brainstorming, learning, and data analysis.

These tools are offering marketers the ability to generate content more quickly, analyze vast amounts of data with greater accuracy, and even come up with creative ideas through AI-powered brainstorming sessions. All leading to significantly positive ROI for their efforts.

Still, 48% of marketers in our survey are concerned about AI replacing their jobs in the next few years while a whopping 69% believes it’s a possibility that AI completely replaces human beings in the workplace one day.

But here’s why Reddy and I think that may not happen.

Why AI Won’t Replace Marketing

1. AI augments the human experience (but it doesn’t replace the human within that experience).

Generative AI can research any topic online and create original content, formatted as a blog post, email, ad, or more, based on the query — and in record time. In the future, rather than needing a team of five or ten content creators, will you just need one — someone to fact-check the AI's content?

Fortunately, Reddy isn't worried. In fact, even though her team used generative AI on a daily basis, she was still actively hiring and growing her team.

As she puts it, “AI augments the human experience, but it doesn't replace the human within that experience. We value writers in our society because they're able to give us a thought-provoking human perspective on the world.

It isn't just about summarizing facts that are out there. It's about humans sharing opinions on very real topics that help build your perspective on how you feel about something. So an AI [tool] could really never replace that human perspective.”

2. AI still has biases.

Because generative AI is still early in its development, it is prone to potential biases and inaccuracies it cannot discern in the information it gathers. These biases can lead to skewed outputs that may not align with reality, making it essential to maintain human oversight in the process.

Reddy highlights this issue, stating, “AI has biases deeply embedded within its models that people are working on. AI has the tendency to hallucinate and start talking about random things when you're asking it for outputs, so it would be really tough to just completely remove a human from the process.”

This tendency of AI to “hallucinate” or produce irrelevant and sometimes nonsensical content underscores the importance of human intervention to ensure accuracy and relevance.

AI is a Tool For Marketers, Not a Replacement

Instead of viewing this technology as a threat, Reddy suggests marketers do this instead:

“I think the angle you take matters on this whole generative AI front. If you’re a writer, content creator, or a marketer, you’ll want to ask yourself:

‘Am I going to be someone that embraces technology and figures out how to upskill myself and actually become the cream of the crop in terms of talent? Or am I going to be someone who pushes technology away, refuses to believe it's happening, and clings onto an old way of life?’”

Although AI will not take your job, you must not underestimate its impact on your role as a marketer. Here’s how Reddy suggests you stay on top of this innovation.

1. Marketers will need to reskill.

As aspects of content creation become more automated, Reddy acknowledges that AI will force content creators to reskill. She told me, “I think it'll force content creators to re-skill. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think that's what every big shift in technology has done for humans.”

She adds, “I've never met a content creator who has said, ‘Wait. I really want to spend more time doing all the rote tasks of reading everything I need to know on the internet about a given topic.’ AI will give marketers more time to be creative, form an opinion, and incorporate more data sources into their perspectives.”

Rather than thinking of AI as a content creator replacement, it‘s better to think of AI as a marketer’s efficient side-kick.

Image Source

Consider this: A marketer decides she wants to write a topic about SWOT analysis.

Rather than spending her morning chugging coffee and reading up on what SWOT analysis means, effective SWOT analysis examples, and how SWOT analyses can help businesses grow, she can simply plug the query into an AI chatbot.

Once she’s confirmed the sources the chatbot used to pull that information are accurate, she can quickly skim through the AI's response and learn everything she needs to begin writing about the topic. She can even use the AI’s response as a first draft, and strengthen it with her own unique tone and perspective.

From there, she can leverage the AI’s proofreading skills to edit her final copy.

Additionally, if the marketer has written a piece of content that she'd like to turn into an entire campaign, she can use AI to re-format her blog post into corresponding ad copy, which she can then hand over to her sales and paid ad teams.

As Reddy puts it, “I can effectively hand over to sales an entire drip campaign, an entire outbound sequence, complete with landing pages, with the ads that people will click and see.

And it really allows me to take control back on what it means to execute a campaign. It enables me to truly be a project manager and a strategist, versus someone who is waiting on other people to deliver their end of the bargain.”

57% of our surveyed marketers also confess to feeling pressured to learn new skills so AI won’t make them irrelevant — so this checks out.

2. Marketers will need to become experts in select AI platforms.

Freelancing platform Upwork recently added a new category, ‘Generative AI’, as a specialty within their marketplace.

This means business leaders can now hire freelance content creators who have expertise with a specific AI platform — and Reddy isn’t surprised.

She continues, “Similar to how a marketer can level-up by becoming HubSpot or Salesforce certified, I think we’ll soon see marketers who demonstrate their value by saying, ‘Hey, I’m skilled in using generative AI platforms.’”

Reddy sees marketers at the forefront of a tool that will ultimately upend all roles within a business, and she believes there's great privilege in being the first to adopt it.

As she puts it, “I think there’s a certain power here that marketers can reclaim, and instead of being the victims in this story of ‘generative AI is coming for marketing’, I think we really reposition it as saying, ‘generative AI has landed in the most innovative portion of the enterprise: marketing.’”

She continues, “And we are now the stewards of this technology and how it'’l be used within the enterprise, and we get to pilot it and see how it can supercharge our work.

And the folks who lean into being the stewards of this powerful technology will reap its benefits. I consider myself and our industry extremely lucky to be in this position.”

But what about the search engines?

Away from getting quick answers to common queries, marketers use search engines to complete tasks like SEO optimization to improve website rankings, conduct keyword research to target relevant search terms and analyze competitors to improve their strategy.

Now, with research being the second most-popular use case for marketers using AI, it stands to reason that they'll be leveraging traditional search engines less often.

And as more people move to AI search engines, tools like HubSpot’s AI Search Grader are helping marketers optimize their search performance.

It's a free app that quickly analyzes your brand based on what your prospects and customers are seeing across AI search engines, then gives you actionable recommendations on how to improve.

But what does this mean for traditional search engines? Would we no longer need, or use, them?

Reddy begs to differ, particularly since the information supplied on search engines is what powers generative AI results. She however sees it drastically changing.

As she puts it, “Search can help battle AI’s inaccuracies. For instance, Jasper has a function where you can toggle on Google search results.

So if I say, ‘Jasper, help me write a paragraph about XYZ,’ it’ll write the paragraph, and at the bottom it’ll put in the Google search results it used while it helped me create that output.

So I have factual links which I can cite, and fact-check to ensure they're the most reliable piece of content on a given topic.”

She continues, “I don't see search going away. I do see a future where I don’t necessarily want to type things into a search bar, and instead, I want to use chat functionality. That, I think, is imminent.

And I think we're already seeing that with the virality of ChatGPT. In just a couple of days, it’s become the fastest-growing consumer app.”

So, will marketing be replaced by AI?

In short, our marketing jobs and search engines are safe — for now.Ultimately, my conversation with Reddy felt positive and uplifting. As marketers, we don’t need to fear AI; We need to embrace it as technology that will help us do our jobs better.

And, personally, I‘m all for any tool that minimizes the amount of time I spend doing rote tasks, so I can get back to what really matters: creating content with the intention to move, inspire, or challenge readers’ to think differently.

Think HubSpot isn’t getting in on the generative AI action? Think again. Learn about our brand-new ChatSpot and Content Assistant tools and how you can access them.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in February 2023 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

In the realm of art and creativity, technology has always played a transformative role. From the invention of the camera to digital painting tools, each advancement has expanded the boundaries of what is possible. Today, we stand on the cusp of a new artistic revolution, driven by the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine …

Continue reading "AI and Artistic Evolution How Machine Learning is Revolutionizing Creativity"

The post AI and Artistic Evolution How Machine Learning is Revolutionizing Creativity first appeared on Lucid Softech.

Kris Hughes is a content strategy and storytelling wizard. He:

✍️ Wrote (and sold) blogs before it was cool

👻 Spent years ghostwriting daily social content for clients, from agencies to CEOs

🖥️ Runs his own digital strategy consulting firm (on track to hit 30% YoY revenue growth)

Here are Kris’ six tips for nailing your content strategy — to generate solid, authentic leads.

1. If You Don’t Tell Your Brand’s Story, Someone Else Will

As a founder with a million priorities, content like blogs and social media posts can seem like low-priority items.

But if you don’t tell your brand’s story, someone else will make assumptions and tell it for you. 

Don’t sit on your hands when it comes to content. Your story and voice need to:

• Be authentic
• Feel natural to you
• Make sense to your target audience

Hot tip: Take a look at your competitors — if they’re not doing a strong enough job of telling their story, they’re leaving content gaps on the table for you to capitalize on.

2. Do a Thorough Brain Dump

Spend ~30 days on a “brain dump” exercise, using voice notes and free-form writing. Record every thought you have on your brand, then pass it on to someone who is close to, but not a part of, your business.

Ask them what they see from the outside looking in. What words are used over and over again? What topics keep returning? This deep-dive step is vital for two reasons.

One: “People are their own worst marketers,” Kris says. “There’s probably a ton about your own brand story you’re not telling. The deep dive and outside perspective brings this to the surface.”

Second, this exercise will spin off aligned talking points so that you can hit the ground running with a clear strategy and bank of great content — in your own words.

3. Extrapolate Four Key Pillars for Your Content

Sift through your brain dump and organize each idea, spicy quote, or topic, into one of four pillars:

Source: Kris Hughes / Zanate Ventures

Each pillar gives rise to specific types of content, and alternating between them will ensure the topics you speak about remain varied and fresh, but also on brand.

For example, one week you may talk about the results you’ve driven for a client (Pillar II), and the next share some of your founder story (Pillar IV).

And if you ever get writer’s block, you can return to your pillars as inspiration and a reminder of what you want to convey to your audience.

4. Focus on Community-Building before You Put Out Content

Create a community from the get-go by interacting with your ideal clients, competitors, and peers through value-driven comments and messages.

This step gets you comfortable with how you write, how you portray yourself, and how people receive you.

Keeping track of comments you make (e.g., in Notion) will also ensure you have a content ideas bank; most valuable comments can usually be bulked up into a post.

5. Now You Can Get Your Content Out There

Use your pillars, saved comments, and brain dump to generate content that is authentic to your brand. Remember to:

📈 Have a clear KPI: Is your content to build generalized awareness, or drive leads?

📝 Develop a voice guide, a resource guide, and a content calendar.

Kris is an advocate of scheduling content to make sure you get it out there. While the cadence and approach of posting will depend on the platform, consistency is always key.

6. Remember: Content Is A Long Game.

It takes time to build up a reputation to the point where your content drives leads. Keep at it. 

“Many founders come in guns blazing with high energy, and then fizzle out after a few months,” says Kris. You’ll miss the magic if you do. Stay motivated by:

• Setting new benchmarks
• Focusing on positive feedback
• Reusing your top-performing posts every few months

As a final tip, Kris suggests talking to your customers when things are going well.

Source: Tenor

“We tend to reach out only when we need to put out fires,” he told us. “But getting client feedback during the good times means you’ll find room for incremental improvement — when you have the capacity to act on it.” 

Positive customer transformation journeys are powerful additions to your brand story.

Welcome to Trends, a weekly newsletter with the zestiest business trends and actionable insights for entrepreneurs.

Julian Shapiro is the founder of numerous startups, including Demand Curve, a growth marketing training program that began life as a Y Combinator investment. He’s also a former marketing columnist for TechCrunch. You can follow him on his website or podcast.

Shapiro graced the Trends team with a lecture on growth marketing, and below, we share 15 of his most actionable tactics.

Table of Contents

1. Retarget Your Newsletter Unsubscribers
2. Do Hyper-Targeted Geo Rollouts to Look Bigger Than You Are
3. Cross-Target Audiences on Multiple Platforms
4. Use Cheap Video Ads to Find What Works
5. Look for Up-and-Comers to Find Cost-Effective YouTube Sponsorships
6. Warm Up Cold Leads Through LinkedIn
7. Turn Blog Visitors Into Leads
8. Do Direct Mail (But Do It Properly)
9. Ease Your Audience into CTAs
10. Use Facebook Ads to Narrow Down Your Copy
11. Figure Out Word-of-Mouth/Referral Programs
12. Grow Your Podcasts Through YouTube
13. Use Break-Even Ads to Raise Brand Awareness
14. Prevent Gmail from Going to Spam
15. Optimize The Time Your Ads Go Out

1. Retarget Your Newsletter Unsubscribers

Background

A customer has unsubscribed from your email list. What can you do to re-engage them?

Tactic

When someone unsubscribes from your email list, they’ve only opted out of receiving your email. There are many reasons this can happen, and most have nothing to do with you. Maybe their inbox is too full. Maybe email is not the format they like.

They may still find your content valuable on other platforms (e.g., Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram). If you have a new product or service, you can reactivate all the people that unsubscribed from your newsletter by using a custom list of churned subscribers.

Examples

Use email lists to create custom audiences of churned subscribers via:

• TikTok
• Instagram
• Facebook Business Manager
• Snapchat
• Pinterest
• LinkedIn

2. Do Hyper-Targeted Geo Rollouts to Look Bigger Than You Are

Background

You’re expanding your presence online. How best to spend your ad money to look 10x bigger than you are?

Tactic

If you're trying to grow your social presence, you don’t want to waste your ad spend by spreading it thin. Instead, make yourself look like the biggest, hottest, and trendiest player of the moment by concentrating your budget into one location.

Partner with several relevant influencers in the same geographic area. Have them all share your product within the same month. This gives your target market the impression that everyone is talking about your product — and that they have to learn more about it.

Examples

Marketing platforms that can help you identify influencers by geography:

• Social Book
• NinjaOutreach
• Or roll up your sleeves and find influencers for free

3. Cross-Target Audiences on Multiple Platforms

Background

Different channels have different strengths. If you’re targeting certain audiences, you might use...

• Snapchat (niche communities): “If you’re selling some digestive problem supplement, Snap might be the only ad channel out there with the niche enough targeting for you to actually target the right people cost-effectively,” Shapiro gives as an example.
• LinkedIn (firmographic data): “They’re the only really good ad channel for firmographic targeting, which means targeting people based on their job and company details. How big is their employer? What are their job levels? How many years have they worked there? And so forth.

“Let’s say you’re a B2B company and you’re selling to just engineers or something... You can use LinkedIn data to find those engineers. But invest your ad spend on the channels they prefer.

However, since these channels don’t convert very well, you may want to cross-target to Facebook or Instagram to close the loop."

Tactic

If there’s an audience you’ve identified that can be micro-targeted on a lower-cost ad channel (like LinkedIn or Snap), you can use that platform to find them, then cross-post to a higher-performing channel (like Facebook or Insta.)

“Pay as little as you can to get the audience you need and then pay as much as you need to on Facebook and Instagram to retarget them. And then that is where you’ll get the net — hopefully conversion that’s profitable.”

Examples

To cross-target ads, options include:

• Test out cross-channel advertising software platforms
• DIY (here is a great article on combing LinkedIn and Facebook ad tools)
• Paying an agency to find and target your audience

4. Use Cheap Video Ads to Find What Works

Background

39% of marketers report that video brings them the highest ROI, according to HubSpot’s State of Marketing research.

Julian is even more confident: “If you can afford the creation of [videos], all other things being controlled, you might see a 50%-100% type improvement in cost per click.”

Thankfully, you don’t have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to find out for yourself.

Julian’s advice? Get started with quick and cheap techniques, but make lots of different versions that can be tested.

When you find one that resonates—meaning it has a good click-through rate (CTR) or cost-per-click (CPC)—then you can consider increasing the production value.

Tactic

What exactly does quick and cheap look like? That depends if you’re B2B or B2C.

B2B Ads

Here is an easy two-step process to cost-effectively make a B2B ad:

1. Show how the product works.
Use a tool like Telestream’s ScreenFlow (or pick your preferred alternative) to record the screen of your app, including the workflow and features.

2. Add professional voiceover.
Use a service like Bunny Studio to have a professional voiceover recording on your video.

B2C Ads

Julian’s tips for cheap consumer-facing video ads:

1. Make an animated video.
For $100 or so, you can go to Fiverr and get a quick product video done.

2. Make a Buzzfeed-style image video.
You can use a tool like Animoto—a drag-and-drop video creator—to splice together static images in rapid-fire, 30-second videos with some overlaid text.

Pro tip: HubSpot’s free Clip Creator tool can make a slideshow-style video (with no watermark) in minutes.

Example

Grammarly has great ads showing its product in use. Here is a punchy example detailing the product’s key spell-check features:

5. Look for Up-and-Comers to Find Cost-Effective YouTube Sponsorships

Background

There is a disconnect in the YouTube sponsorship model.

YT creators often charge based on their number of subscribers, but that doesn’t always translate 1:1 into views of your ad.

Tactic

First, look for the up-and-coming creators that speak to your niche or community.

“One discrepancy you can take advantage of is to find folks with low subs, but their videos get a ton of views because they’re talking about something hot and viral. The idea basically is before they’re fully priced in and they’ve built up their subscriber base, try to go for some of those folks who are really breaking out.”

Second, negotiate to pay for views, not subs.

Also, get that ad in early in the video:

“People in the Demand Curve community tell me that sponsorship spots that run in the first 30-60 seconds of the YouTube video significantly outperform those in the middle or at the end.”

Example

Only a handful of years back, musician Mary Spender had a five-digit subscriber count but managed to score a sponsorship from British amp manufacturer Orange.

Today, Spender boasts almost 750k subscribers and her videos often tip into the millions of views. That’s a lot of eyes on Orange.

And while getting in on the ground floor isn’t necessarily the goal of this tactic, I bet a number of other guitar companies are kicking themselves for not seeing it sooner.

6. Warm Up Cold Leads Through LinkedIn

Background

To state the obvious, warm leads are better than cold leads. Pre-targeting is a digital way to warm up leads before a cold outreach.

The concept is to run ads in front of people before you email them. You do so to raise brand awareness so that when they get your email they’re like, “Oh, of course, I’ve heard of you guys.”

With pre-targeting you see better:

• Open rates
• Click-through-rates
• Odds of getting a call back

Tactic

Per Julian, the most effective use of pre-targeting is via LinkedIn:

“Take your list of [email contacts] and upload that to LinkedIn ads. It’ll match some percentage of those folks, and then you run ads to them for 2 weeks—just talking about what it is that they don’t yet know they’re going to be emailed about.”

7. Turn Blog Visitors Into Leads

Background

A lot of high-traffic blogs aren’t focused on turning those visitors into leads. They could become major sources of conversion by taking a page from email capture techniques.

Tactic

Here are 2 of Julian’s favorite tactics to capture an email from blog traffic:

1. Quizzes
   “Offer a quiz if you’d like, and require an email from them to see the quiz results. With that email, you send drip emails and so on, follow up emails in the future, and now you have a real contact, a real lead that you can do something with as opposed to traffic that disappeared.”
2. Gated content
   “A second strategy for grabbing emails that I’ve seen work is buyer’s guides. So put together a PDF—really high-quality, awesome consumer reports. Give people the first 2 pages as a teaser and say, ‘If you want this whole thing, give us your email.’
   
   And it doesn’t have to be a buyer’s guide. This tactic also works with templates, calculators, whitepapers, or original survey data. Anything that provides your audience genuine value.
   
   “And they’ll share it around too, and then that’ll bring more people in.”

Example

Sample Quiz (Murad Skincare): Take quiz --> email results.

Quiz-Making Tools: Hubspot, Typeform, SurveyMonkey

8. Do Direct Mail (But Do It Properly)

Background

As advertising moved to the internet, direct mail (AKA snail mail) became underutilized. But with the right techniques, that channel can still be effective.

Tactic

There are 3 key hacks to make direct mail effective:

1. Test it with a large enough sample size
   “Really important thing here is you need a sufficient sample size and it’s going to be a lot larger than you probably think. So you want to send to at least 10k recipients and you want to send them each mail three times. So 30k pieces gets you that sufficient sample size to start having some idea as to whether this might actually work for you.”
2. Include time pressure and a clear CTA
   “The second thing people do wrong is they don’t actually have a time pressure and clear call to action on the piece of mail. So on that piece of mail, it should be, ‘Hey, you have 3 days to use this coupon to do this following thing, which we think is relevant to you.’”
   
   But what if they don’t get the mailer within those three days?
   
   “Don’t worry, that’s why you’re going to send three pieces of mail staggered. They’ll get it on the second or third trial.”
3. Track performance via a custom domain name
   “The third thing people do wrong (and this why direct mail gets a bad rep) is they don’t have a proper tracking strategy. And so obviously you can add a coupon on the mailer, that’s the obvious approach, but a lot of people just hit up your website, forget about the coupon and you have no idea where they came from.”

Believe it or not, there’s a tech solution even with this low-tech tactic.

“So an alternative is having a custom domain name that’s only used for your mailers. Let’s say your domain is demandcurve.com, for your mailers, you could have dcmarketing.com. They don’t know which one’s your real domain name, but when they type that one into the browser, it forwards to demandcurve.com and expands a full list of tracking codes called UTM tags in the URL, so now you can track it.”

Example

A more modern example of direct mail marketing is the integration between PostGrid and Postalytics with HubSpot. Connecting your printing service to your CRM allows you to automate drip campaigns, postcards, and more.

For example, you could set up a campaign to automatically send a birthday card with a coupon on each customer’s special day.

9. Ease Your Audience into CTAs

Background

A call-to-action (CTA) is a bit of content that tells the reader how to take the next step. In digital marketing, that’s usually a button that moves you to the next step of the purchase funnel.

Done right, a well-placed CTA nurtures a visitor into a customer — but you can actually hurt your conversion rate if your CTAs are too aggressive too soon.

Consider a website with a “Buy Now” CTA right at the top of their home page. Suddenly the visitor is being asked for contact info or credit card details before they’re convinced they even want your product.

Tactic

Really think about the journey prospects take while on your landing page.

Per Julian:

“It’s really effective to actually ease off the CTAs [on your landing page] and just write exceptionally good copy. Convince people that what you’re doing is exactly for them and get them so excited that when you do introduce the CTA halfway down the page, now they’re stoked, they click it and they fill out all your stuff.”

Example

Here’s an example of non-aggressive landing page copy:

No pressure. No sales lingo. Just find a domain name for your website. We’ll talk about price later.

10. Use Facebook Ads to Narrow Down Your Copy

Background

With CTAs and paid ads, even subtle changes can make an outsized difference in conversion performance. It’s important to always be testing and refining your ad copy.

However, doing such tests directly from your website (or in your pricey ad space) may not be practical.

Tactic

The best way to test changes in copy is on Facebook: it costs pennies for thousands and thousands of impressions.

Here’s how:

1. Have 10 Facebook ads (or however many variations you think of)
2. Make controlled changes between the versions (Ex: change the copy, but keep the imagery and audience the same)
3. See which ad has the highest CTR
4. Pick the winner and run it everywhere else
5. Repeat this process for all types of text (e.g., blog titles)

Example

Here is how to split test ad versions directly on Facebook.

And for you HubSpot users, here’s how you can create and track FB ads straight from Marketing Hub.

11. Figure Out Word-of-Mouth/Referral Programs

Background

While all paid acquisition channels (e.g. Pinterest, Google, LinkedIn, etc.) have analytics dashboards to help you with ad spend attribution, there are so many ways for conversions to fall through the cracks.

People change devices, go into incognito mode, or use other people’s computers. And the attribution challenge is even harder when it comes to figuring out word-of-mouth (WOM) and referrals.

Luckily, there is a way to determine how much new customer acquisition volume is not being accounted for: it’s called geographic lift.

Tactic

Geolift is frustratingly underused because it's hard to explain well. But once you understand it, you’ll find that it’s as simple as it is powerful. (And, bonus: it doesn’t require third-party identifiers.)

Say you want to test a new Facebook ad campaign. You start by picking two geographic markets with similar marketing/sales performance.

You focus all of your ad spend on just one of those markets. We’ll call that one Market A. Or, as Julian puts it: “Let’s say you just blast your typical budget for a month exclusively in one area like San Francisco.”

At the end of a predetermined time period, you compare the performance of Market A and Market B.

Obviously, that shows you how your ad campaign performed. Now comes the less obvious part.

You subtract the leads or sales of Market A from your total leads and sales for all markets during the time the experiment was run.

The remainder must have come from untrackable efforts like word-of-mouth, referrals, brand awareness, etc. Therefore, you now have a ratio of trackable-to-untrackable leads/sales.

And if you apply that ratio to your KPIs it allows you to estimate existing unaccounted conversions and even project for their future impact.

12. Grow Your Podcasts Through YouTube

Background

There are numerous platforms to help you quickly launch a podcast: Spotify, iTunes, Buzzsprout, etc.

According to Julian, if you’re going to launch a podcast, you should strongly consider cross-posting on YouTube.

Tactics

Julian lays out the case for YouTube as a podcast growth engine:

• The ultimate viral machine
  “YouTube is the best viral algorithm machine for distributing your podcast, and if you rely exclusively on Spotify or iTunes to get distribution, [you’ll have issues] unless you’re a celebrity or you have PR contacts or are the features editor at iTunes or Spotify.”
• Thinking YouTube first
  “It’s actually quite advantageous to have a video-based podcast. Audio content on YouTube, like a long form audio interview, doesn’t perform very well. It’s not going to be as performative as a sit-down, face-to-face video interview. YouTube prefers the video stuff [and] so do viewers—that’s why they’re going to YouTube.”
• Make your podcasts timely
  “If there’s this big news coming out and that was something you wanted to talk about on your podcast, talk about it that week while the news is hot and make sure they’re relevant keywords in your YouTube video title—and when people search for that topic on YouTube... you will now pop up. And if you tie it properly, you can take advantage of all these search trends.”
• Get guests with built-in audiences
  “Probably the easiest way to grow is just to interview people who actually have their own networks, people who have their own audiences—so when they come on, they bring their fans with them, and their fans will search their name on YouTube throughout the coming years and will find you.”

Example

Jenna Kutcher’s Goal Digger podcast is a Forbes top-rated show that boasts over 100 million downloads.

Yet she still cross-posts to YouTube, where her most popular videos regularly pull an additional 2-3k views.

That’s a few thousand more eyeballs who may have never found her otherwise.

13. Use Break-Even Ads to Raise Brand Awareness

Background

A lot of times, companies will barely get ads to break even (meaning the value finally covers the cost) and then they’ll turn them off and say, “That was a waste of time.”

This is not always the right move.

Tactics

Obviously, the first goal of running ads is to be profitable. However, if your campaign is in the break-even range, there is an opportunity to keep running it for brand awareness.

Per Julian: “Think about how many companies spend millions of dollars to increase their brand awareness,” so that you’re already primed to buy by the time you see a more targeted ad.

“So if you’re getting break-even ad spend, it’s not a bad thing, it could be an awesome freeway to get tons of brand awareness.”

14. Prevent Gmail from Going to Spam

Background

The bane of email marketing campaigns is getting rerouted to the spam box. Familiarize yourself with Gmail’s spam rules to best optimize your email campaigns.

Tactics

There is no quick hack here. Familiarize yourself with Google’s Email Sender Guidelines.

Though this thread is now a few years old, the advice from a Google Diamond Product Expert is still on point. Focus on these areas when reading the guidelines:

• Authentication & Identification
• Subscription
• Unsubscribing
• Format
• Delivery
• 3rd-Party Senders
• Affiliate Marketing Programs

15. Optimize The Time Your Ads Go Out

Background

If you’re selling pizzas, you should definitely run your ads at night. Otherwise, you don’t want your customers to encounter your ads when they can’t act on them.

So if your business relies on you being present for the interaction, you need to control the time when your ads are displayed.

To make sure that your ads aren’t running at night, you have to apply the concept of day parting (which automatically turns off your ad targeting at night).

If you’re not using day parting, you’re probably missing out on ~30% of ad spend efficiency.

This is particularly true if you’re running ads on LinkedIn. They are notorious for running ads at midnight which—as you can imagine for a professional network—is a terrible time to reach people.

Tactic

Per Julian: “To do day parting on Facebook can be a pain, unless you do something called campaign-based targeting. It’s not conducive to having most professionals run ads, at least in my experience, so what I do is I use a 3rd-party tool (e.g., AdEspresso) that lets me do day parting on Facebook and Instagram.”

Example

Here is an explanation of how to do dayparting on Facebook.

 

Today, we are bringing you a handpicked collection of the best textures, patterns, and backgrounds that capture the essence of jungle and forest environments.

Jungle and forest textures are incredibly versatile, fitting seamlessly into a wide range of creative projects. From bold, adventurous designs to subtle and serene backdrops, they can be used in everything from website designs to product packaging and digital art.

Whether you’re looking to convey the untamed wildness of the jungle or the calming beauty of forest landscapes, these textures will add depth and realism to your visuals. These textures are designed to bring out the intricate details of leaves, trees, and natural landscapes. Have a look.

Tropical Backgrounds with Jungle Plants

This is a vibrant pack of diverse tropical forest backdrops. Laden with trendy tropic leaves, these can easily be used for exotic wallpapers, greeting cards, posters, or placards. This vector-based assortment is easily editable and customizable due to its well-organized layers, and it’s compatible with numerous graphic programs. The pack includes AI, EPS, JPG, PDF, and PSD files.

Creative Tropical Forest Backgrounds

Another engaging collection of diverse forest-themed backgrounds. Featuring vibrant jungle plants, tropical birds, and leaves, these backgrounds can be used for exotic wallpapers, greeting cards, posters or placards. Easy to edit and resize due to their vector shapes and well-organized layers, the package includes AI, EPS, JPG, PDF and PSD files for maximum versatility.

Forest & Jungle Patterns Collection

This is a collection of forest texture backgrounds with 40 hand-drawn seamless vector patterns. These fully editable patterns convey an exotic, adventurous vibe, perfect for branding, packaging, fashion apparel, posters, and web backgrounds. The pack includes EPS and AI vector files, JPEG and PNG images, and a helpful instruction file.

Deep Jungle Gold Patterns Bundle

Unleash your wild side with this collection of jungle-themed patterns. This comprehensive collection features 30 distinctive, seamless patterns in an array of colors. Incorporating rich, gold hues and exuding a unique, jungle-themed aesthetic, these patterns are versatile and perfect for personal projects like decor and postcards, or professional branding and product design endeavors.

Jungle Birds Seamless Pattern

A vibrant, colorful forest background pattern for modern design projects. Provided in both JPEG and Photoshop PAT formats, this high-quality design features rich, nature-inspired imagery. At 60 x 60 cm and boasting a resolution of 300 dpi, it captures the essence of a lively jungle, complete with an assortment of birds, making it a versatile choice for a range of projects.

Exotic Jungle Plants Pattern

Explore the captivating beauty of the jungle with this abstract jungle plant pattern. Bursting with sharp textures of rich plants like bird of paradise, ferns, and snake plants, this pattern is ideal for sprucing up your backgrounds, textiles, or templates. Try using it on dresses, shirts or even bedsheets for a refreshing tropical aesthetic.

Green Forest Texture

Check out the stunning green forest texture, a stylish and dynamic seamless pattern. Beautifully textured with meticulous detailing, it presents an original forest-inspired background. The design comes in a JPEG file format, sized at 64 x 64 cm with a crisp 300 dpi, ensuring you get top-notch quality. It’s a versatile creative asset from a third party that is canvas-ready for your numerous design aspirations.

Forest Ferns Seamless Pattern

This forest fern seamless pattern is ideal for various backgrounds. This package includes one exquisite pattern design, infused with delicate forest fern motifs. Available as a high-resolution JPEG and PAT file, it’s perfect for various design projects, adding a touch of natural elegance to your artwork.

Forest Jungle Seamless Pattern

This is a vividly designed seamless pattern that perfectly captures the allure of the jungle. It comes as a high-resolution 7559 x 7559 px JPEG and PAT. file. With its seamless design and a crisp 300 dpi resolution, this image brilliantly complements any project that requires a dash of nature-inspired aesthetic.

Trees & Forest Patterns Collection

This backgrounds pack boasts three intricate, seamless designs in adaptable AI, EPS, and PNG formats. Perfect for introducing a rustic, natural element to your projects, these patterns can be easily customized to suit your needs. Ideal for invitations, greeting cards, or digital backgrounds; they’re a perfect way to infuse your designs with a touch of tranquil forest beauty.

Green Jungle Pattern Texture

This pack is perfect for enhancing your projects or presentations with a touch of nature. This collection boasts high-resolution texture photographs of forests, optimized for easy visibility of your designs or information. With an impressive 4000 x 3000 px and 300 DPI, it’s an apt choice for conveying ideas or messages related to nature.

10 Tree Bark Textures

This pack offers a unique selection of high-resolution backgrounds (4000x3000Px) of tree bark textures. Ideal for a range of projects from arborist or forester logos to nature illustrations, these images can also enhance your graphic designs or artistic creations.

20 Tree Trunk Textures

A unique and high-quality tree trunk textures pack in incredible 8K resolution. Consisting of 20 JPG files (6000 x 4000 px), these textures are compatible with Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and other graphic programs capable of reading .JPG files, making them a versatile addition to your design toolbox.

20 Tree Bark Textures

This bundle offers a collection of high-resolution JPG textures that showcase the unique grains of tree bark. Crafted in impressive 8K resolution, compatible with Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, and any graphic program that can read JPG files, these 20 versatile textures can add a touch of nature to any digital project.

Forest Gradient Texture Background

This is a contemporary-styled creative asset comprising ten gradient texture images, sized at 6400x4400px and 72dpi. Presented in a versatile JPG format, these high-resolution images are ideal for a myriad of uses, including wallpaper backgrounds, artwork, presentation slides, website designs, posters, and covers. Their forest-themed aesthetic adds an enchanting allure, enhancing your design or print work.

10 Tree Forest Textures

A captivating collection of high-resolution textures and digital papers, designed to enhance future projects. Perfect for various uses from graphics to branding, social media to scrapbooking, their compatibility with Adobe Photoshop CC ensures seamless integration. The backgrounds come in JPG and PNG formats with a 6000 x 4000 px resolution.

Cartoon Forest Backgrounds

Loaded with vivid vector illustrations, this set includes everything from cartoon-style forests and mountains to rivers and trees. An ideal pick for your projects needing a dash of nature-themed whimsy, this artistic package offers designs in various formats, including AFDESIGN, PNG, JPG, SVG, PDF, and EPS.

Free Forest Textures & Backgrounds

Free Tree Bark Texture

This free forest texture features a close-up of a tree bark. It’s been made with a real photo of an actual tree. The texture will surely add a more authentic look and feel to your design projects.

Free Realistic Tree Bark Texture

Another photorealistic tree bark texture features a close-up photo of a real tree. This texture is perfect for adding a nature-inspired rough look to your designs. It comes in AI, EPS, and JPG formats.

Free Tree Trunk Texture

This is a high-resolution texture of a tree truck that comes in JPG format. The texture is a great option for adding a weathered and old vibe to your designs. It comes in 5472 x 3648px resolution.

Free Forest Trees Texture

This is a high-quality photo of a forest scene that features a pattern-like view of a group of trees. You can download this photo in high resolution and use it as a texture for various types of designs.

Free Aerial Forest Background Texture

A beautiful aerial photograph of a forest featuring a wide view. This forest image is perfect for adding a nature-themed background to your designs. It will also work quite well as a texture as well.