The Blog Pros

Welcome to Creator Columns, where we bring expert HubSpot Creator voices to the Blogs that inspire and help you grow better.

A habit that has woven itself through many facets of my life, like parenthood, my health, and entrepreneurship, is a consistent check-in I like to do with how I’m growing.

I often call it a ‘life inventory’ where I scoop up everything I’m working on, learning, and feeling, and ask myself about what’s going well and what needs to shift.

Inevitably, I spend a little bit of my check-in time wandering back down memory lane to the beginning stages of starting my business. With over a decade’s worth of experience, successes, trials, and a whole lot of teachable moments, it’s normal to wonder what I might’ve done differently if I knew then what I know now.

While I could wax poetic about all the things I wish I could share with my 20-something self, the advice I would give for starting my business is rather simple.

‘Keeping it simple’ might be the best way to summarize what I’ve learned about almost everything in life. So, take a step back with me to those early days while I share what I’d do first, without overthinking, if I was starting my business over today.

Maybe you’re looking for a fresh start in your business or a little insight from a seasoned entrepreneur as you start on your own business journey. I hope this advice helps not only give you that clearer starting line you’re looking for but also combats that pressure to start perfectly.

I know you want to mitigate risk and avoid as many pitfalls as possible. But the learning curve is part of the journey. In the meantime, let these five insights guide your vision and keep that process as light, fun, and adventurous as possible!

The First Things I’d Do If Starting My Business Over

1. Start an email list.

Starting an email list has to be my first piece of advice for you because I cannot count how often I’ve guided new business owners and entrepreneurs to do this over the years.

I learned how much easier growing a business can be when you don’t have to count on platforms you don’t own and can’t control to deliver your valuable messages to the people you’re creating for.

While social media is important it can also be a space where you waste time, money, and creative energy trying to engage your audience that lives on the other side of a strict, ever-changing social media algorithm.

My advice? Start an email list as soon as possible before any of those resources are spent in places that won’t deliver tangible results. A nurtured email list means you’re showing up in the inboxes of people who want to hear from you, buy from you, and stick around for your stories and growth.

On social media, they might tap that follow button, but from there, they might not see your content for weeks, months, or even years.

And unlike your social media pages, your email list isn’t one hacking incident away from being totally erased, it’s an asset that you own. That’s a powerful difference from what any other platform can offer you online.

As you create new offers (paid or free), you’re able to see if what you’re serving up is irresistible enough for people to want to exchange their email addresses for it. As a new business owner, this is an easy, free way to start gauging what your audience wants most from you.

2. Find a mentor.

Mentorship can feel like a big move for a new business owner … with an even bigger price tag. We crave answers and guidance in the beginning, but usually with a beginner budget, we tend to keep mentorship on the back burner.

I spent a little too much time piecing together my own plan out of stubbornness and feeling like I needed to earn all my advice.

But, as someone who eventually would become a mentor to many, I realized how much mentors want to give their advice to newbies! And not all mentorship needs to be one-on-one or costly. There are mentorship opportunities all around us if we know where to look.

First, look for free learning pathways. Tune into a podcast, like Goal Digger, my business and marketing podcast, where I share not only what I’m learning in business but open up conversations with amazing thought leaders, entrepreneurs, and visionaries to pull out their insight, too.

Plus, I even drop episodes that are live mentorship and coaching sessions with all kinds of people who are at their own starting lines or turning points in business.

Learning from other leaders who inspire you can also be as easy as taking a digital course. They can teach you through their course that can come at a more accessible price point while delivering their brilliance right to your screen.

Find someone who’s gone before you and is doing something similar to what you want to do or how you want to do it. Look for people who align with the kind of business owner you want to become. If they have a course, take it. If they have a book, read it. If they host live classes or have an online community, grab a seat.

Eventually, whenever you’re ready, you might even go out on a limb and ask them to mentor you in whatever capacity they can. You might just land your dream mentor!

3. Share your focus and goals.

This can be a tough part of starting a business because the pressure to be impressive or show off our success can keep us from showing the building process.

The journey doesn’t always look ‘pretty’, and it can be tempting to hide those parts (like when we clean up our entire house before the house cleaner comes over.)

But looking back, I regret those moments when I hid my learning process, waiting for everything to be ‘perfect,’ keeping me from growth because when is anything ever perfect? Letting people in on my journey is when my business completely shifted and growth started building in huge waves.

My audience responded to these seemingly messy or incomplete glimpses into my process with a resounding “This is so real!” We related on a whole new level and more people wanted to work with me, trust me as a client, and buy into my new offers.

Beyond ‘being relatable’, here’s why sharing your process and focus is so effective: you want your offers to make sense to the people you’re making them for. The only way they’re going to get the clearest picture of your offer is to let them in long before you finally share the ‘tada!’ moment.

Surprise drives way less results than anticipation. Show your people what you’re working on and allow them to support and champion you!

4. Get clear on your brand vision.

Starting your business is already a massively pride-worthy moment.

I was so proud to finally get out of my corporate, windowless office and launch into my career as a photographer and then as a digital marketer, but what I needed to get grounded with was my brand. Early on, I genuinely didn’t know the difference between my business and my brand.

An easy way to boil it down is that your business is simply your offer. It’s the solution you give your clients, the service you sell, the products you produce! But your brand is your personality behind every offer, service, and product. Sure, Audi makes cars, but how a person sells them makes all the difference, right?

From your social media, your website, your ads, your blogs, and everywhere else you show up online, your personality should be visible. Don’t hide behind your offers or think that they speak for themselves.

In fact, you’re their best advocate. Your excitement and confidence in what you’ve created is what resonates with your audience!

Your personality can show up long before you even have something to sell. Think about how you show up on social media.

• Do you know why you’re posting or creating?
• When you take a step back, is your brand vision clear with everything you post?
• Can you see your own unique perspective, flavor, and approach woven into your captions and images?

If you’re struggling here, I’ve coined a social content approach called the JK5 that might help keep your creative flow simple.

Every time you go to create a post, choose one from your five unique content pillars that guide your content creation and show your brand personality to your followers. It could be parenthood, pets, style, interior design, poetry, or anything that shows who YOU are!

If you want to learn more about the JK5 and your brand pillars, listen to this episode of my podcast!

5. Choose your tools wisely.

I learned this analogy through my experience as a photographer, juggling a variety of lenses in my camera bag. I felt this pressure when I was just starting out to have every single lens for every possible scenario.

As my business grew, I bought new lenses but learned that there were just a few that I would reach for over and over again. I didn’t need all the shiny tools right away, and in many cases, never needed them at all.

When you’re just starting your business, you’ll probably be inundated by all the options for the best tools and platforms out there. It’ll make your head spin.

But most of them aren’t necessary for what you need on day one. You don’t have to spend your time and money merely looking like a business when that could easily distract you from being able to do the real work.

Take a few steps back and analyze what your biggest needs are. Differentiate between the ‘nice to haves’ and the ‘need to haves’ to keep your growth moving forward.

A key to helping yourself know the difference is by looking at the tasks that are already on your to-do list vs the ones that you’re looking forward to doing in the future.

For instance, you might need to invest in accounting software before the bells and whistles for your website. In fact, I’ll fully admit that I didn’t have a real branded, designer-made logo until THIS year.

You can go farther than you ever imagined with much less than you think!

Honor Your Own Journey

Overall, the biggest surprise to me is that I don’t actually want to redo any of it.

As someone who takes so much joy in the learning process itself, it’s only through the hiccups, the guesses, the mistakes, and the early days that I was able to awaken the unrelenting life-long learner and educator in me.

My learning journey is the only reason I can have hindsight enough to meet people at their starting lines or messy middles and be able to help them skip some of the confusion. I love helping smooth out the starting lines.

You’re so much more capable of amazing things than you might know, so any chance I get to help people like you get there is a joy.

So, while these are in some ways insights born out of moments of ‘regret,’ I would say I have a much greater appreciation for them as transformative experiences.

Honor your own flubs and challenges along the way! They’ve not only helped YOU become who you are and the skills you carry, but they’re also a pathway for you to help others make it through the mess as we’re all out here just trying to figure it out as we go.

Every year we see new trends emerge in the world of design. While most of these new trends fade away with time, some remain to change and influence the industry for the better.

In this post, we explore the ever-evolving world of illustration trends and designs. From the rise of AI-assisted drawings to the resurgence of retro and psychedelic art, these are the trends you can expect to see more of this year.

Let’s take a look at some of the top upcoming illustration trends and how you can apply them in your own designs and projects. Some of these trends will not only be popular but also groundbreaking by bringing in new advancements and innovations.

1. AI-Assisted Illustrations

Designers have different opinions about the advancements of AI and how it’s impacting the industry. However, AI has clearly made work much easier for us. And that’s the main goal of using AI. It should not be used to replace designers but to enhance your workflow and make you more efficient.

Adobe understood this concept better than most other AI startups. During the Adobe MAX 2023 event, Adobe showed how they have improved Adobe Illustrator to help artists and designers create art more easily.

You can now generate vectors with text prompts, find exact matches for fonts, create icons, get variations of your illustrations, copy art styles, and more. These new tools will save you a ton of time and supercharge your process of finding inspiration, coming up with different concepts, and experimenting with different ideas.

2. Representation of Diversity

One of the trends that we hope to see more of this year is illustrations that represent diversity, culture, and traditions. We saw many brands and companies use these beautiful illustrations on their marketing campaigns, websites, and social media platforms to promote inclusiveness and diverse representation.

This trend is not just about representation, it’s also about celebrating different cultures, expanding the boundaries of perspectives, and bringing people together. It’s a mission that we will always promote with an open heart.

3. Colorful Abstract

Abstract illustrations have been a powerful visual form that amplifies storytelling for many years. This year, we expect to see this art trend continue to grow.

These beautiful illustrations excel at captivating audiences with colorful visuals and communicating ideas, moods, and messages much more effectively. Whether it’s for branding design or packaging design, colorful abstract illustrations fit perfectly for many types of projects as well.

4. Retro and Psychedelic

We all have a soft spot for those classic and groovy illustrations full of vibrant colors and weird shapes. Last year, we saw many artists combine this retro style from the 70s and 80s with psychedelic-style art to create very uncommon and trippy illustrations.

We’ve been seeing these retro and psychedelic illustrations on everything from product packaging designs to website designs and even branding designs. It seems to be getting more popular with casual and lifestyle brands that target younger audiences as well.

5. Art Deco

The Art Deco design trend is commonly used in various types of packaging designs, brand identities, and graphic designs as a way of showing off elegance and sophistication. It’s a trend that’s been around for decades but over the past few years we saw this trend being used more commonly by modern brands.

This trend will likely continue to be popular in the world of design and illustrations thanks to its ability to combine vintage aesthetics with futuristic vibes. Especially when it comes to luxury and high-end illustrations, Art Deco is unmatched for creating unique nostalgic feels.

6. Comic Book Art

The illustrations done in comic book art style are another new trend that’s slowly gaining momentum in the design world. This trend helps add a playful, humorous, and exaggerated look to your illustrations to create a bold retro aesthetic for various types of designs.

Whether it’s website design, poster design, or packaging design, comic book-style art blends perfectly with many different types of mediums as well. It’s also quite effective for brand storytelling and creating designs that communicate with the audience more effectively.

7. Doodle Art

No matter how old we get, we all have childhood memories that we always long for. Doodle art is a trend that’s designed to take you back to that wonderful childhood while evoking a sense of playfulness and free spirit. It’s one of the reasons why this trend has been around for such a long time and it will continue to be as effective as ever before.

Many popular brands have been using doodle art and illustrations as a way to create a more relaxed vibe and also bring out a sense of joy in the audience at the same time. The quirkiness and the imperfections of this art style allow any business or brand to strip away the formalities and create a close connection with its target audience.

8. Surrealism

The unreal, bizarre, and nightmare-ish surrealism illustration trend continues to surprise us every year by maintaining its popularity across many different industries. When it comes to creating designs that spark curiosity and imagination, nothing comes close to surrealist illustrations.

The distorted human figures, weird manipulations, and the weird elements used in surrealist illustrations often have hidden meanings and tell a story that explores controversial topics. And it opens up new doors for artists, media, and brands to share their narratives in mesmerizing ways.

9. Textured Illustrations

We went through several different illustration trends over the years from flat design to minimal artwork and the latest to join this lineup is the textured illustrations trend. This new trend sees illustrations getting a much-needed texture upgrade that adds more depth to the overall look and feel.

Textured illustrations will be one of the most popular illustration trends this year for two main reasons. First, they add an authentic and hand-crafted look to digital illustrations. Second, they create a more rugged and tactile vibe for the illustrations, replacing the overly smooth, artificial look of ordinary digital art.

10. Line Art

The great thing about line art illustrations is their versatility. Line art drawings can be as simple as a few lines or complex artwork but they will always maintain an overall simple and minimal look. This gives line art illustrations a classic yet timeless look.

Especially when designing illustrations for digital platforms, minimalist line art is an obvious choice as it reduces file sizes and helps improve performance. They are also quite effective in conveying ideas and creating adaptable art across different platforms and mediums.

11. Realistic 3D Art

3D art generation tools like Blender and Unreal Engine received significant updates last year that expanded their capabilities beyond our imagination. Designers have been using these tools to generate ultra-realistic 3D art and illustrations and the results were mind-blowing.

We will surely see more of these realistic 3D art and illustrations this year as well. Especially since the demand for this art is increasing as more industries seem to be embracing this new trend.

12. Nostalgia

When it comes to creating art and illustrations that connect with the audience on a personal level, nostalgic art is the perfect way to go. These illustrations excel at evoking emotions and good memories from the past and go a long way to establishing a strong connection with the audience.

Many brands have been using this trend to create emotional connections with their customers while also celebrating the history and good times from the past.

13. Geometric Art

There were many interesting art and design trends over the years that were inspired by the geometric style of art, including the popular Bauhaus style. And now, they are slowly influencing illustrations as well.

Illustrations inspired by geometric art styles have their own unique styles and we love how artists keep reinventing this trend while putting their own unique spins to create cool artworks.

14. Cartoon and Comic

Caroon and comic-themed illustrations do two things perfectly: They are great at adding a sense of whimsy to your creations and also conveying emotions more effectively.

When it comes to educational projects, casual and fun designs, and even creating mascots, and characters that represent brands, cartoon-style illustrations have been the ideal choice for decades.

Even though it’s not a new trend, we will surely see more cartoon and comic-style illustrations this year. Because it simply works wonders!

15. Outline Drawings

This is an illustration trend that will never go out of style. Because it’s the perfect style for creating art and illustrations that exude elegance and simplicity.

Outline drawings and illustrations have a particular way of creating a minimalist vibe for any other project. It helps create that subtle, fine art-style look that you can’t achieve with any other illustration style. And that’s why it will always be a trend you can rely on.

16. Brave and Bold

Recently, designers have been creating some radical and bold creations, much more than they used to. Mainly because modern brands and businesses now seek to create more open and authentic identities. And these brave and bold illustrations help achieve that goal.

This is a trend we would love to see more of this year. We are particularly curious how designers and artists will handle this experimental illustration style.

Conclusion

There will also be many other new trends this year, possibly ones we couldn’t even imagine. So be sure to keep an eye out for those. You can always check out our Trends category to stay on top of your game.

Happy fall, MiM-ers! Grab your pumpkin-spiced latte, settle in with Noah Kahan's Stick Season, and get ready to hear from a paid marketer who’s all-in on influencers, storytelling, and AI-targeted ads.

(I'm sorry I can’t offer up a more recent fall-inspired album. To be fair, I'm still obsessed with my "Summer 2019" mix.)

Keep reading to learn why Zapier's head of paid ads thinks the golden age of paid ads is over. 

1. Fully embrace the influencer buzz. 

James de Feu says the golden age of paid advertising is over. And he's okay with it. 

He's also the manager of paid ads at Zapier. 

(I'm currently imagining Mad Men's Don Draper rolling over in his TV grave.)

De Feu is so confident about influencer marketing that he negotiated to bring it under his paid ads team. He succeeded because, moving forward, "we see that as our brand motion." 

In fact, when I asked how he'd spend a hypothetical $1k, de Feu tells me he'd put a hefty 40% into influencers. 

But don't delete your Google Ads account just yet. De Feu says he'd still give 50% of that hypothetical budget to paid ads. (The other 10% would go to SEO, if you got stuck trying to add this up to 100.) 

As he acknowledges, "Paid ads will always be on, and we'll still spend a ton of money there. But paid ads live and die in that spending month. It's not getting us the reach it once did."

That's why de Feu isn’t putting all his eggs in one basket. Paid is still a good egg (err-basket?), but he's excited to seek out influencers who thrive on the same platforms where Zapier's customers hang out. 

"I smirked when you mentioned influencers, because that's the name of the game — even for those of us in the B2B space,” he tells me. “It's no longer just about glossy teenage products anymore."

2. Storytelling is the bread and butter of marketing.

"In the world of paid ads, we get fixated on one single, siloed experience, and we just keep trying to optimize it until it's perfect," de Feu says. "But one thing we've learned is that storytelling is huge." 

"Storytelling is huge" is exactly the same pitch I gave my parents when I was trying to convince them that majoring in creative writing was a sound financial decision — but de Feu isn't wrong. If there's one truth that remains consistent in the world of marketing, it's that humans have always, and will always, love a good story.  

"Stretching something out, building a story, creating use cases, highlighting testimonials — I let go of that over the past couple of years, and I'm just grateful now that we've reset ourselves. Storytelling has always been, and will continue to be, our superpower as marketers." 

So if you're unsure of where to start in the world of paid ads, try this: Talk to your customers, learn their pain points, and then communicate your solutions through a good ole-fashioned tale. 

3. Get used to cha-cha-changes. 

David Bowie preached it: You've got to keep up with all the changes happening in the advertising industry or risk throwing precious cash down the drain. (Those are the lyrics, right?)

For de Feu, that means doing tons of tests to learn how to use AI to personalize Zapier's ads — not just in creating assets, but in audience targeting, too. 

"You have to be really on top of all these recent changes or you'll end up wasting money," he says. 

An example could be an athletic brand that uses AI to target yoga apparel ads to their vinyasa-loving consumers while ensuring their golf apparel is sent to every guy on Wall Street. 

In other words: The future of ads will look a lot more like high-intent, targeted content, and less like the generic, all-purpose ads we've come to know and hate. 

Hello Gang! I'm grateful once again for the advice to use MySQL over Postgres. It's been a pretty smooth experience so far. Unfortunately I had to migrate to a different host and have been getting an undefined variable error.

Mysql is Running. I used the package manager to get python-mysql.connector installed. And yet I keep getting an undefined variable error.

Here is the output:

Exception creating initial db connection
Error:  module 'ssl' has no attribute 'wrap_socket'
Error type:  <class 'AttributeError'>

Here is some test code if you need to replicate it:

import base64
import mysql.connector as mysql
try:
    connection=mysql.connect( host="localhost", database="iheartdaniweb", user="funuser", password="supersekritpass") 
except Exception as error:
    print("Exception creating initial db connection")
    print("Error: ", error)
    print("Error type: ", type(error))
connection.autocommit=True

Thanks in advance gang! Unfortunately the interwebs were no help with this one or I wouldn't bother you guys! Thanks again!! !!

Many of you — perhaps most of you — have been sitting on the sidelines while WordPress and WP Engine trade legal attacks on one another. It’s been widely covered as we watch it unfold in the open; ironically, in a sense.

These things can take twists and turns and it doesn’t help that this just so happens to be an emotionally charged topic in certain circles. WordPress is still the leading CMS after all these years and by a long shot. Many developers make their living in the WordPress ecosystem. All of those developers need hosting. WP Engine is still the leading WordPress-flavored host after many years. Many developers host their agencies there and use it to administrate their clients’ sites.

And I haven’t even gotten to the drama. That’s not really the point. The point is that there’s a bunch of heated words flying around and it can be difficult to know where they’re coming from, who they are aimed at, and most importantly, why they’re being said in the first place. So, I’m going to round up a few key voices contributing to the discussion for the sake of context and to help catch up.

Editor’s Note: Even though CSS-Tricks has no involvement with either company, I think it’s mentioning that Automattic was a looooooong time sponsor. This site was also once hosted by Flywheel, a company acquired by WP Engine before we moved to Cloudways following the DigitalOcean acquisition. Me? My personal site runs on WP Engine, but I’m not precious about it having only been there one year.

Prelude to a tweet

We had fair warning that something was coming up when WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg sent this out over X:

I know private equity and investors can be brutal (read the book Barbarians at the Gate). Please let me know if any employee faces firing or retaliation for speaking up about their company's participation (or lack thereof) in WordPress. We'll make sure it's a big public deal and…

— Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) September 19, 2024

There’s the ammo: Don’t let private equity bully you into speaking up against the company you work for when its contributions to WordPress are on the slim side of things.

Private equity. Lack of participation in the WordPress community. Making a big public deal of it. Remember these things because this is one day before…

WordCamp US 2024

Matt spoke at WordCamp US (WCUS) 2024 in Portland, OR, last week. September 20 to be exact. Making big, bold statements at WCUS isn’t a new thing for Matt, as many of us still have “Learn JavaScript deeply” tattooed on the brain from 2016.

Matt’s statements this year were less inspirational (instructional?) as they took direct aim at WP Engine as part of a presentation on the merits of open-source collaboration. You can watch and listen to where the first jab was thrown roughly around the 10:05 marker of the recording.

Let’s break down the deal. Matt begins by comparing the open-source contributions to WordPress from his company, Automattic, to those of WP Engine. These things are tracked on WordPress.org as part of a campaign called “Five for the Future” that’s designed to give organizations an influential seat at the table to form the future of WordPress in exchange for open-source contributions back to the WordPress project. Automattic has a page totaling its contributions. So does WP Engine.

Before Matt reveals the numbers, he goes out of his way to call out the fact that both Automattic and WP Engine are large players in the neighborhood of $500 million dollars. That’s the setup for Matt to demonstrate how relatively little WP Engine contributes to WordPress against Matt’s own company. Granted, I have absolutely no clue what factors into contributions, nor how the pages are administrated or updated. But here’s what they show…

Quite the discrepancy! I’d imagine Automattic dwarfs every other company that’s pledged to the campaign. Maybe it would be better to compare the contributions of another non-Automattic pledge that has a fairly strong reputation for participating in WordPress community. 10up is one of the companies that comes straight to my mind and they are showing up for 191 hours per week, or roughly five times WP Engine’s reported time. I get conflicting info on 10up’s revenue, valuation, and size, so maybe the comparison isn’t fair. Or maybe it is fair because 10up is certainly smaller than WP Engine, and no estimate I saw was even close to the $500 million mark.

Whatever the case, bottom line: Matt calls out WP Engine for its lack of effort on a very public stage — maybe the largest — in WordPress Land. He doesn’t stop there, going on to namecheck Silver Lake, a ginormous private equity firm bankrolling the company. The insinuation is clear: there’s plenty of money and resources, so pony up.

That’s bad enough for attendees to raise eyebrows, but it doesn’t end there. Matt encourages users and developers alike to vote with money by not purchasing hosting from WP Engine (11:31) and seems to suggest (23:05) that he’ll provide financial support to any WP Engine employees who lose their jobs from speaking up against their employer.

I think I can get behind the general idea that some companies need a little prodding to pull their weight to something like the Five for the Future campaign. Encouraging developers to pull their projects from a company and employees to jeopardize their careers? Eek.

“WP Engine is not WordPress”

This is when I believe things got noisy. It’s one thing to strong-arm a company (or its investors) into doing more for the community. But in a post on his personal blog the day after WCUS, Matt ups the ante alleging that “WP Engine isn’t WordPress.” You’d think this is part of the tough-guy stance he had from the stage, but his argument is much different in this post. Notice it’s about how WP Engine uses WordPress in its business rather than how much the company invests in it:

WordPress is a content management system, and the content is sacred. Every change you make to every page, every post, is tracked in a revision system, just like the Wikipedia. This means if you make a mistake, you can always undo it. It also means if you’re trying to figure out why something is on a page, you can see precisely the history and edits that led to it. These revisions are stored in our database. This is very important, it’s at the core of the user promise of protecting your data, and it’s why WordPress is architected and designed to never lose anything.

WP Engine turns this off. They disable revisions because it costs them more money to store the history of the changes in the database, and they don’t want to spend that to protect your content. It strikes to the very heart of what WordPress does, and they shatter it, the integrity of your content.

OK, gloves off. This is more personal. It’s no longer about community contributions but community trust and how WP Engine erodes trust by preventing WordPress users from accessing core WordPress features for their own profit.

Required reading

That’s where I’d like to end this, at least for now. Several days have elapsed since Matt’s blog post and there are many, many more words flying around from him, community members, other companies, and maybe even your Great Aunt. But if you’re looking for more signal than noise, I’ve rounded up a few choice selections that I feel contribute to the (heated) discussion.

Reddit: Matt Mullenweg needs to step down from WordPress.org leadership ASAP

Matt responds to the requisite calls for him to step down, starting with:

To be very clear, I was 100% cordial and polite to everyone at the booth, my message was:

* I know this isn’t about them, it’s happening several levels above, it’s even above their CEO, it’s coming from their owner, Silver Lake and particularly their board member Lee Wittlinger.

* Several people inside WP Engine have been anonymously leaking information to me about their bad behavior, and I wanted to let them know if they were caught or faced retaliation that I would support them in every way possible, including covering their salaries until they found a new job.

* That *if* we had to take down the WP Engine booth and ban WP Engine that evening, my colleague Chloé could print them all new personal badges if they still wanted to attend the conference personally, as they are community members, not just their company.

This was delivered calmly, and they said thank you, and their head of comms, Lauren Cox, who was there asked that they have time to regroup and discuss.

Automattic’s Actionable Misconduct Directed to WP Engine

WP Engine issues a cease and desist letter designed to stop Matt from disparaging them publicly. But hold up, because there’s another juicy claim in there:

In the days leading up to Mr. Mullenweg’s September 20th keynote address at the WordCamp US Convention, Automattic suddenly began demanding that WP Engine pay Automattic large sums of money, and if it didn’t, Automattic would wage a war against WP Engine.

And yes, they did issue it from their own site’s /wp-content directory. That’s easy to lose, so I’ve downloaded it to link it for posterity.

Open Source, Trademarks, and WP Engine

Just today, Matt published a cease and desist letter to the Auttomatic blog where he alleges that WP Engine’s commercial modifications to WordPress Core violate the WordPress trademark. Again, this has become about licensing, not contributions:

WP Engine’s business model is based on extensive and unauthorized use of these trademarks in ways that mislead consumers into believing that WP Engine is synonymous with WordPress. It’s not.

This is trademark abuse, not fair competition.

This is no longer WordPress vs. WP Engine. It’s more like Automattic vs. WP Engine. But with Matt’s name quite literally in the name Automattic, let’s be real and call this Matt Mullenweg vs. WP Engine.

WP Tavern coverage

WP Tavern is still the closest thing we have to an official WordPress news outlet. Nevermind that it’s funded and hired by Automattic (among others). I respect it, though I honestly have been less attentive to it since the team turned over earlier this year. It’s still a great spot to catch up on the post-event coverage:

• Highlights from Matt Mullenweg’s Spiciest Word Camp Presentation at WordCamp US 2024 (Sep. 24)
• Automattic Responds to WP Engine’s Cease and Desist with Legal Action (Sep. 24)

There’s another more recent WP Tavern article I want to call out because it’s a huge development in this saga…

WP Engine Banned from Using WordPress.org Resources

Dang. This is the point of no return. It not only affects WP Engine proper, but the Flywheel hosting it also owns.

WordPress.org has blocked WP Engine customers from updating and installing plugins and themes via WP Admin. 

I was able to update plugins on my site as recently as yesterday, but let’s see as of this morning.

Maybe I can still see details about my installed plugins…

This is a bad, bad situation. I have thoughts about it and neither side looks good. Using real people with no dog in the fight to make a point is never gonna be a good look. Then again, both sides have valid points and I can see where they’re coming from. I just hate to see it come to a head like this.

Update (Oct. 3, 2024)

The story continues, of course — and it ain’t slowing down. WP Tavern is on the ball and publishing regular updates, although remember: it’s an Automattic publication at the end of the day. Matt’s been the most vocal player so far, so it stands to reason that WP Tavern might want to amplify things.

In any case…

• WP Engine Banned Again, Reports Deploying a Solution
  WP Tavern reported that WP Engine deployed a workaround for its banned status on WordPress.org, but it was short-lived because whatever loophole they found was plugged up. Notice the screenshots showing strides that WP Engine has taken to distinguish itself from WordPress (the brand) on its site in several places.
• Automattic Publishes WP Engine Term Sheet Amidst Controversy
  Today, I learned that (1) this fight has been going on for “years” (in Matt’s words), (2) the royalty rate offered to WP Engine appears to rise with each passing month (it was 7%, then 8%), but (3) but that’s now off the table.
• Mullenweg threatens corporate takeover of WP Engine
  Oh, my dear! This would be a sad conclusion. That said, I have no bones to pick at Matt’s informal poll asking whether WP Engine’s Advanced Custom Fields Pro should be baked into WordPress Core. I’ve never understood why WordPress has never built a UI for custom fields, perhaps other than the spirit of open source and allowing plugin developers to thrive. Custom fields ought to be a core feature of any CMS as they are needed to, you know, manage content throughout a site by making it more pliable.

Catching Up on the WordPress 🚫 WP Engine Sitch originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

A new tool from Eric Meyer, Brian Kardell, and Stephanie Stimac backed with Igalia’s support. Brian announced it on his blog, as did Eric, describing it like this:

What BCD Watch does is, it grabs releases of the Browser Compatibility Data (BCD) repository that underpins the support tables on MDN and services like caniuse.com.  It then analyzes what’s changed since the previous release.

Every Monday, BCD Watch produces two reports. The Weekly Changes Report lists all the changes to BCD that happened in the previous week — what’s been added, removed, or renamed in the whole of BCD.  It also tells you which of the Big Three browsers newly support (or dropped support for) each listed feature, along with a progress bar showing how close the feature is to attaining Baseline status.

Browser support data is at MDN. There’s also plenty at Caniuse.com. The two share data, in fact, though not all of it. We now have Baseline, which is also cited in MDN and Caniuse alike. It’s nice to see an effort at cracking a central spot for all this — organized by date, no less.

Oh, and hey, there’s a feed. Even better.

You can also poke at its repo. Thanks a bunch, Eric, Brian, Stephanie, and Igalia! This is super helpful and already part of my toolkit.

BCD Watch originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

As someone who has experimented with different AI marketing tools, I can confidently say that embracing AI can benefit marketing teams looking to become more efficient in reaching their goals.

While it can automate tasks, save time and costs, and boost productivity, there are some AI challenges marketers should be aware of.

Our 2024 AI Trends report found that 74% of marketers predict most people will use AI in the workplace by 2030. So, I figured I should explore the challenges marketers could face when working with AI, so they're prepared as it becomes a bigger part of their workflow.

I’ll also highlight expert insight from industry leaders so you can learn how to tackle these challenges and harness the power of AI in marketing.

• The 10 Biggest Challenges When Implementing AI
• 12 Tips for Implementing AI

The 10 Biggest Challenges When Implementing AI

Along with the benefits of using AI in marketing outlined in the image below, the challenges of implementing AI in marketing are vast.

Image Source

This includes challenges related to the AI systems, processes, team buy-in, and more. We‘re working through the most significant challenges and the data that justifies these day-to-day challenges. You’re not the only one feeling the struggle.

Here are 10 common challenges when it comes to AI in marketing.

1. Hampering Creativity

As brands like Coca-Cola and mega-celebrities like Nicki Minaj use generative AI in their marketing campaigns, many marketers worry that AI could stifle creativity.

Our marketing and AI survey found that 43% of marketers who use AI do so to create content.

With such a huge chunk of marketers using AI to create, it's understandable to have concerns that the marketing landscape could become oversaturated with AI and lose its creative spark.

However, there are several ways marketers can avoid this pitfall.

One key to overcoming the challenge is for marketers to use AI as an assistive tool that streamlines their process or gets the creative juices flowing.

2. Undermining Competency

If you‘re concerned that AI could undermine your competency as a marketer, you’re not alone.

According to our survey, 57% of marketers feel pressured to learn AI or risk becoming irrelevant. This translates to sentiments that AI could undermine a marketer's effort and competency at work.

Though AI is becoming increasingly ingrained in marketing, that doesn‘t mean marketers can’t remain competitive and shine in the workplace.

Marketers can overcome this challenge by learning more about AI's functionality, how different AI tools work, and finding ways AI can boost productivity or troubleshoot roadblocks.

3. Extra Time Commitments

If you want a sound output from AI, you need excellent input. That means you need to know what to ask for based on your goals.

Prompting AI for marketing is another thing to add to your swelling to-do list.

Like any new skill, prompting AI needs to be learned and practiced. The good news is that the time taken to prompt and use AI may be a case of short-term pain for long-term gain.

Based on our research, if you can prompt AI to deliver generative content that you're happy to publish, you could save as much as three hours and ten minutes when working on a single piece of marketing content from start to finish. Not bad.

In fact, our survey found that 75% of marketers use AI to reduce the time they spend on manual tasks.

4. Creating Working Processes

A contributing factor to the challenge of time constraints when implementing AI is creating processes. However, navigating the challenges of AI will be easier with a working process.

If you use AI, you want all team members to work with it similarly. An AI process is required to help eliminate bias and ensure everything is fact-checked, and it naturally provides best practice tips to use AI tools efficiently.

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5. Inaccurate Information

In our state of AI in marketing research, we found that one of the top challenges for marketers implementing AI is pushback regarding inaccurate information.

It's unsurprising, considering almost half of the marketers surveyed have received incorrect information from generative AI.

Producing inaccurate information is undoubtedly a valid concern for conscientious marketers, and it could damage brand reputation and brand/consumer relations.

6. Poor Quality Content

Similar to the challenge above, poor-quality content concerns conscientious marketers. But there's an argument that this does not need to be a challenge.

As I mentioned earlier, 43% of marketers in our survey use AI to create content.

With so many marketers leveraging AI in their creative processes, it‘s important to remember that AI isn’t always going to generate accurate results.

So, remember to fact-check AI outputs always.

7. Privacy and Data Analysis

There are broad concerns about privacy and data analysis regarding using AI.

When it comes to data analysis, marketers use AI to analyze customer data and understand user behavior. However, it has its own set of challenges. When implementing AI into your workflow or customer interactions, do the following:

• Consult with your supervisor and/or IT department before inputting sensitive data into AI.
• Be cautious of free trials, as they may retain your data after your trial is up.
• Choose trusted AI software with a proven track record of reliability and security.

8. Job Replacement

The worry about job replacement has been around for a while, and it’s understandable.

In 2017, a McKinsey report studied considerations around the workplace in 2030 and how AI might impact it.

The report estimated that “between 400 million and 800 million individuals could be displaced by automation and need to find new jobs by 2030.”

The good news is the findings are yet to come to fruition. In fact, our report finds the opposite to be true. According to our AI Trends Report, 68% of marketers surveyed say has helped grow their career.

But the fear is still there. You might find some pushback when implementing AI with your team if they’re worried about job security.

Now, the subject of job replacement and AI is much more positive. Mike Maynard, the CEO at Napier, published an article titled Will AI Lead To The End Of Marketing Jobs? in Forbes.

Maynard said, “AI will inevitably replace certain aspects of traditional marketing, but by and large, it will probably be the tedious, mundane tasks, like analytics, that most of us aren’t enthusiastic about anyway."

He explained, “The truth is that although AI can potentially automate certain tasks and improve efficiency, it is unlikely to replace marketing teams for the foreseeable future completely.”

There are reasons to believe that AI is here to solve tasks and will never replace human teams in marketing. Naturally, marketing leaders must convince teams that their jobs are safe.

9. AI Bias

AI bias is a challenge that most marketers should be aware of.

Ultimately, AI will always be biased because humans are biased. Marketing leaders need a plan to meet the challenge of teams inputting bias into a system.

Bias is a serious consideration and challenge for businesses, and its impact can be serious. DataRobot’s 2022 survey found that the impact of data bias can result in as much as 62% lost revenue.

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10. Keeping Up with New Trends and Technologies

The field of AI is constantly evolving, and it’s growing fast. Marketers can feel overwhelmed keeping up with the latest trends and technologies.

It’s hard to know what to try, prioritize, and invest your time into. This challenge is particularly overwhelming if you have business heads pushing your team for more.

12 Tips for Implementing AI

Okay, now we know what some of the biggest challenges are, let's find out how to overcome them in a way that helps you reach your marketing objectives while you reap all the AI benefits you’ve heard so much about.

Here are 12 tips to help you do just that.

1. Enforce AI policies.

Dan Robinson, Head of Marketing and e-Commerce at instantprint, recommends that businesses implement and enforce AI policies to aid smooth AI implementation.

The solutions he‘s integrated into instantprint’s AI implementations include:

“Employees must adhere to the guidelines we‘ve set out. We nurture an environment of trust but also provide our team with the rules and regulations they need to be aware of to use these tools effectively and safely. Our ‘AI Code of Conduct’ is set out by each platform we use, with do’s and don't for each tool.

“We want to make our AI policy a collaborative space. Those using AI and other models will get to know the platforms in great detail. Making policies a shared effort means that we're more likely to have rules that will work for our team, developed by our team, with the exception of legal and ethical frameworks as a standard.”

What we like: Robinson doesn‘t deny the importance of AI policies that are legal and ethical but doesn’t stop the team from adding their thoughts. With a collaborative effort to develop policies, you’re more likely to get buy-in from team members.

2. Start with low-risk AI implementations.

Rosella Dello Ioio, Head of Content at Enate, says, “Businesses should be clearly defining the data they can and can't share with public and private AI models. Consider hiring a Chief AI Officer to take the lead on security and governance within the business.

“Once the rules around these challenges have been clearly established, begin rolling out GenAI in your marketing department by identifying all the people whose job involves creating (writing, designing, and building) and let them find the best AI co-pilot for their tasks.

Creative roles such as Copywriting and Graphic Design are relatively low-risk in terms of sensitive data as opposed to a CRM Manager who wants to use GenAI to analyze customer feedback and complaints.

Test and procure low-risk tools to support these creative individuals in boosting productivity and slashing the time spent on mundane tasks while ensuring governance protocols are adhered to."

What we like: It's justified for marketers to be concerned about data and analysis by AI tools, but Dello Ioio has found a solution that allows marketing leaders to start implementing AI in a way that feels manageable and safe.

Sometimes, the first step is the most challenging, and once leaders get rolling with AI, they may be inspired to try more.

Look at HubSpot’s AI content assistant for low-risk AI experimentation. It’s free to demo, and you can write content, create emails, landing pages, and more.

3. Leverage AI alongside your existing tech stack.

Cassey Bowden, Director of Marketing at Promet Source, recommends that marketing leaders consider new AI tools with existing tech and your talented team.

She says, “When used effectively in combination with other tools and skills of our respective teams, the door is wide open for possibilities. I would encourage folks to look at AI as an assistive tool in their digital toolbox.

Those who will see the best results and realize the most benefits of AI, in my opinion, will be those who view this tech through a Venn diagram lens.

Leveraging this tech along with your existing tech stack in addition to your skilled team, where these overlap, is where we will find success."

What we like: Bowden’s tip could help marketing leaders close the gap on challenges that hamper creativity. If AI is used in addition to your skilled team, then there's everything to gain through collaboration.

Consider taking the best of AI and the best of that all-important human touch and find the areas where they can best support each other.

4. Talk to your team.

Communication is, of course, everything! When it comes to AI, marketing leaders can eliminate a lot of AI challenges with team buy-in and communication.

Jessica Packard, Content Strategy Manager at ClockShark, found that some reassurance allowed her team to see AI for what it is; a marketing tool that can aid their workflow.

Packard says, “Initially, my team of copywriters was apprehensive about how AI could potentially replace their work in the organization."

She continues, "The fear was understandable, but it was important to reassure them that the AI tools are still underdeveloped and they cannot create copy that successfully engages readers on an emotional level as humans do.

It’s also important to show them how leveraging AI can be beneficial to their work, from brainstorming content ideas to help writing creative titles and meta descriptions."

Montse Cano, International SEO & Digital Marketing Consultant at Montserrat Cano, shared similar tips for overcoming AI challenges. She follows a set of questions and uses AI in a way that helps teams.

She shares her process, “We identify what needs we have in our team that we could meet by using AI. Is it code generation, text content ideas, or images? Then, assess current resources to test and validate outputs, i.e., do we need any training, hire someone else.”

Johannes Larsson, Founder and CEO at Johannes Larsson, adds to the importance of communication with an onus on regular comms and empowerment.

Larsson says, “We regularly communicate with our team about the benefits of AI and how it can empower them rather than threaten them. We also aim to provide training and resources to help them develop new skills and expand their knowledge in areas where AI is involved.”

What we like: It might seem simple to suggest communication, but it’s easily forgotten when you’re all busy at work. Cano, Packard, and Larsson have recognized the why behind team challenges and recommended how you can solve this challenge through communication, reassurance, and future training.

5. Test AI with your team.

In line with the importance of talking to your team, Kevin Miller, co-founder and CEO of GRO, encourages marketers to improve their workflow efficiency with AI.

He started with a solid goal, improving his team’s efficiency by 400%, and worked with his team to document AI success.

Miller shares his story, “We experimented with ChatGPT earlier this year to improve writing efficiency for long- and short-form content creation.

For our clients, we want to produce the highest-quality work possible to help them grow their domain authority and online traffic, so automation was a natural strategy to pursue that goal. That being said, it's not a one-stop-shop tool."

He continues, “Aiming to improve workflow efficiency by 400% by leveraging AI tools, we asked writers to adapt their workflows and give feedback on how well ChatGPT helped improve their writing and deliverability.

Although we did not hit those marks because of many natural obstacles and limitations of the software, we increased workflow efficiency by 200% through content templates and research assistance.

ChatGPT is fantastic for content generation and assessment, but can‘t do the work alone. It is still a part of many of our writers’ workflows to use as they see fit, and I am confident that it will continue to grow in capacity and use."

What we like: Miller and his team have experimented with ChatGPT and actively found that AI can improve team efficiency. We especially like the level of involvement Miller’s team had in AI experimentation.

With his team reporting back on their AI feedback, we feel Miller was more likely to get buy-in from team members.

6. Get your processes locked down.

Adam Smith, founder of The Content Machine, has mastered AI prompts. His test website was just 30 days old and boasted over 36,000 clicks and over 1 million impressions. All of his content was created using AI.

Image Source

Smith says, "I’m using totally un-edited AI content, straight from ChatGPT. There's a big misconception that AI content is rubbish or garbage.

However you can create helpful content if you get your ChatGPT processes locked down! You aren't going to be creating high-quality content with ‘write me a 1,500 word article on x topic’ type prompts."

According to Smith, there’s more you can do to improve the quality of content, he advises you, “Add unique images, add internal links to other contextually relevant blog posts, add as much schema as possible, and embed related YouTube videos.”

What we like: With a well-thought-out prompting process, Adam Smith has proved that AI content can be helpful, and it can rank. (And it’s even better when the data backs up the claims.)

7. Find the areas where AI is most effective.

Using AI doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing scenario. You can find the opportunities or tasks that AI is most capable of solving; then you can do the rest.

Sara Cooper, Director of Web Strategy at SimPRO, found that her team found AI most beneficial at generating headlines or sections of copy.

Copper says, "One of the biggest challenges has been feeding AI the right directives to get the output we are looking for and learning to not ask for too much from AI upfront.

For example, as the team has started to leverage AI to generate more content across our website, it‘s clear that it’s most effective when supporting the personalization of headlines or sections of copy rather than generating whole landing pages from scratch."

Jessica Ruane, Senior Content Manager at Beekeeper, echoes Cooper. Ruane says, “A big challenge that surrounds AI is effectively utilizing it in Content Marketing. Companies are definitely using AI to varying degrees during the content creation process.

Some may be fully writing content with the use of AI, while others are utilizing it for research and inspiration. The best way to implement AI in content is — slowly. Focus on the ‘voice’ that you’d like to use, and experiment with rewriting phrases to get started.”

What we like: Ruane and Cooper agree that there’s a place for AI in content writing. Equally, they’re both seeing the role of AI vary based on what marketers find more useful. Consider using AI for different tasks and find what works for you and your team. AI doesn’t have to write everything.

8. Experiment carefully.

Sofia Inga Tyson, SEO Content Editor at Juro, resolves the AI challenge of quality and brand with careful experimentation and full disclosure to key stakeholders.

Tyson says, “There are certainly concerns about the use of AI in content strategies diluting the quality and overall authority of the website.

Businesses are often keen to experiment with AI to scale their content production but content writers are naturally fearful that AI-generated content at scale will have a detrimental impact on the performance of existing, expertly crafted content.

I think it’s really important to manage stakeholder expectations in this regard and ensure that these risks are disclosed to other decision-makers in the business that might be encouraging this approach for aggressive growth.

I also think it’s important to be cautious about AI-generated content because the true impact won’t be felt immediately. It could be months or even years before the content is evaluated negatively based on the quality or use of AI.

Any experiments should be just that - careful, closely monitored and kept at a scale that means it can be reversed if needed. I think this approach will bring a lot of content writers comfort as it demonstrates that you’re approaching the use of AI with caution, not carelessly jeopardizing the online presence you have already."

What we like: Tyson’s holistic approach to AI covers brand reputation, the team, and stakeholders. She considers the desire to leverage AI with the needs of the team who use it. We love the reassurance for all involved when experimentation is monitored carefully.

9. Monitor quality and accuracy.

Once you’re set up and using AI, you don’t want to neglect the all-important quality check.

Annika Haataja, Head of SEO at Seeker, says, “As you expand your use of AI, don‘t forget to monitor quality and accuracy. We all know that AI can sometimes make mistakes, which may hurt adoption if teams don’t trust the results.

Have people review a sample of AI output to catch errors, and empower them to have faith in their own expertise in the process.”

What we like: Diligence around AI output could decline as teams become comfortable with AI usage. Haataja reminds us to stay mindful of quality and accuracy as AI adoption scales, an important reminder for all of us.

10. Refine your data sources.

Simon Brisk, Director at Click Intelligence Ltd., found AI bias a challenge. Interestingly, they found better data once his team refined the data sources.

He says, “One significant challenge we‘ve faced at Click Intelligence when integrating AI is ensuring data integrity. AI models are only as good as the data they’re trained on. Inaccurate or biased data can lead to misguided marketing decisions.

“For instance, while analyzing user behavior for an e-commerce client, skewed data initially suggested a preference for a specific product line. Only after refining data sources did we realize a more holistic preference trend, thereby recalibrating our marketing strategy.”

What we like: Brisk’s experience with AI bias shows the potential impact and the solution. By recalibrating data sources, Click Intelligence could recalibrate its marketing strategy based on reliable data.

11. Stay competitive.

The world of AI is developing fast. Chris Stott, Director at Seven Marketing, recommends staying ahead of AI developments.

He says, “Staying ahead of the competition is paramount. It's essential for us to consistently deliver exceptional value. This means rigorously testing all AI software to keep us on the cutting edge and guarantee that we provide top-tier results to our clients.”

What we like: Incorporating AI into your systems can be exciting and empowering. Testing AI from a place of experimentation is a great way to explore AI capabilities with your team. You’ll soon get a feel for what supports you and what you can live without.

12. Overcome data integrity and change management.

Jessica Shee, Senior Tech Editor and Marketing Content Manager at iBoysoft, shares the importance of overcoming data integrity and change management.

She says, “Change management and data integrity are two significant obstacles to implementing AI in marketing. For accurate AI-driven insights and decision-making, it is essential to ensure high-quality, pure data.

Misaligned data can cause inaccurate forecasts and ineffective marketing campaigns. Invest in data cleansing, validation, and data integration tools to address this issue.

Change management is an additional obstacle. Integrating AI can disrupt existing workflows and require team members to acquire new skills. Transparent communication about the benefits of AI and training team members to cultivate acceptance and proficiency are necessary for a smooth implementation.

Working with AI experts, integrating teams in decision-making, and starting with trial projects can help integrate AI while resolving difficulties. A systematic strategy, continual training, and clear communication ensure a smoother transition and optimize AI marketing benefits."

What we like: Shee recognizes that you don’t have to do everything alone. You can bring in experts and start with trial projects to help support your team through AI implementation challenges.

What's stopping you from implementing AI?

There's no harm in experimenting with AI automation so long as you follow the guidelines I laid out in this post.

In the worst case, you‘ve run an experiment (and isn’t that what marketing is all about?), and in the best case, you've got the data to support the success of your AI endeavors. Getting buy-in from your team or stakeholders will be easier when they know AI drives marketing objectives.

Plus, with the top tips from marketing leaders, you’ll start with the best possible insights to make AI and marketing an absolute success.

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

Vouchers and coupons are a key part of any marketing strategy, offering customers special discounts and incentives to drive engagement and sales. But to truly catch the eye, these vouchers need to look polished and professional.

In this blog post, we’ve gathered the best voucher and coupon mockup templates to help you present your designs in a realistic and appealing way. Whether you’re designing for a restaurant, retail store, or online brand, these mockup templates allow you to showcase your voucher or coupon designs with style.

From clean and modern layouts to more elaborate, creative designs, these templates are perfect for visualizing how your final product will look in the real world. Have a look.

Modern Voucher Mockup Template

This is a modern and customizable mockup template for showcasing your voucher and coupon designs. This kit offers four high-resolution PSD files that you can easily edit to place your designs. You can also alter the contrast, design, or even the background color and textures according to your needs.

Gift Voucher Mockup Template

This voucher mockup template is fully customizable and integrates seamlessly with Smart-Objects for easy replacement of designs. The high-quality resolution of 3000 x 2000 px at 300 DPI ensures stunning visuals. A comprehensive help file is included for your convenience.

Natural Voucher Mockup Template

A versatile voucher mockup template for showcasing food and nature-themed product vouchers. It provides 4 different templates, all customizable via smart objects for easy editing. It features high-resolution (4500x3000px, 300 DPI) well-layered PSD files with adjustable light, capable of accommodating both bright and dark designs.

Voucher Coupon Mockup Template

This is a crisp, easy-to-use voucher mockup template ideal for showcasing your voucher designs. This template features smart objects for hassle-free editing, well-organized layers for speedy adjustments, and the capacity to modify the background color to match your designs. It offers a realistic photo quality along with a fully layered PSD, well-structured layers, and 300 DPI optimisation.

Stylish Gift Voucher Mockup Template

A customizable voucher mockup template for creating engaging gift vouchers or tickets. It’s ideal for social media posts and presentations to clients. This template features four high-resolution PSD mockup scenes, easy-edit smart objects, variable light settings, and a changeable background. Plus, all objects and shadows are fully separated and editable.

Discount Voucher Mockup Templates

A set of voucher mockup templates that are ideal for professionally displaying your unique coupon designs. Comprised of five different gift voucher Photoshop mockups, the templates offer smart-object features for effortless design replacement, adjustable background colors, and impressive high-resolution imagery (3000×2000 px, 300 dpi). Suitable for anyone with Photoshop CS4 and up.

Creative Voucher Mockup Templates

This collection of voucher mockup templates can make your voucher designing process effortless and quick. These templates, provided in a neatly organized and high-resolution PSD file, incorporate smart-object features for easy and fast editing. They can handle all designs, bright or dark, and allow customization like background color tweaking, separate shadows, and light adjustment.

Elegant Coupon Voucher Mockup Template

A versatile, professionally designed voucher mockup template kit. Perfect for displaying business logos, discount vouchers, and promotional designs, it captures attention and elevates your brand’s visibility. Easy to edit with Photoshop, these high-resolution mockup files come in an RGB color mode. Brilliantly crafted for showcasing branding design, the set includes three files, a user guide, and enables customizable background colors and designs.

Simple Gift Voucher Mockup Template

This is an efficient tool for crafting gift coupons. It features 4 items within a well-layered PSD file. Utilizing the smart-object feature, you can swiftly personalize the existing design effortlessly. The template comes with organized layers and folders, customizable background colors, and both bright and dark design options.

Dark Voucher Mockup Template

A versatile voucher mockup template for showcasing your gift voucher designs professionally. This creative asset includes 4 PSD Photoshop format files, features a high resolution of 4500x3000px, and a customizable background. The included smart-object features make editing quick and easy, catering to both bright and dark designs.

Colorful Voucher Mockup Template

This is a vibrant and user-friendly voucher mockup template ideal for showcasing your promotional designs. The template features a photorealistic mock-up with a high resolution of 5000×3000 pixels, smart object background, and is easy to maneuver. It also comes with built-in photo filters, enhancing the visual appeal of your vouchers.

Bold Voucher Mockup Template

This is a professionally designed voucher mockup template perfect for displaying your brand’s coupon design. With four easy-to-use Photoshop mockups, it offers smart-object features for quick design replacements. Moreover, it allows background color alterations, boasts a high-quality resolution of 3000x2000px at 300 dpi, and includes a helpful guide file.

Stylish Voucher Mockup Template

An excellent voucher mockup template for presenting your designs with a professional and realistic edge. It comes as a high-resolution, easy-to-use PSD file, compatible with Photoshop CS4 or higher. Among its key features, the template offers a changeable background color, convenient smart-object attributes, and a helpful PDF guide.

Unique Coupon Mockup Templates

This is an expertly designed voucher mockup template kit perfect for showcasing your business logos, coupons, and discount vouchers. The high-resolution, fully-editable PSDs can be tailored to your preference using Photoshop’s smart objects, allowing you to effortlessly change designs and colors. With three files included, these templates are ideal for presenting your branding and heightening your brand’s visibility.

Minimal Coupon Mockup Templates

A valuable voucher mockup template pack for those seeking sleek, structured coupon designs. With 05 high-resolution (4500x3000px, 300 DPI) PSD files included, the bundle allows for easy and speedy editing via smart objects and organized layers. Features such as customizable background colors and adjustable lighting cater to both bright and dark design preferences.

Modern Gift Voucher Mockup Template

This voucher mockup template provides a sleek and efficient solution for crafting gift vouchers. It comes with two PSD styles, featuring a high-resolution design (4500×3000 pixels, 300dpi), and a certificate size of 7×3″. Its organized layers and folders and simple editing via smart objects make personalizing your vouchers a breeze.

Basic Coupon Mockup Templates

This is an effortless way to professionally present your unique voucher designs. Comprising of five easily customizable Photoshop mockups, these templates have a smart-object feature that lets you swiftly insert your designs. They also offer changeable background-colors and come in a high-resolution, 300 DPI, 3000×2000 pixel format.

Classy Voucher Mockup Template

This voucher mockup template boasts a refined and elegant design, perfect for those aiming to showcase their products professionally. Featuring four PSD files with a high-resolution of 4500×3000 and 300 dpi, this template is easily editable and well-organized. It’s a fantastic and efficient tool to preview whether your design vision will translate successfully before execution.

Free Coupon & Voucher Mockup Templates

Free Coupon Cards Mockup (PSD)

This is a free mockup you can use to showcase all types of coupon and voucher designs. It features a very realistic-looking mockup scene that will make your designs look much more alive and real in presentations.

Free Voucher Card Mockup (PSD)

This mockup template is also free to download and it features a unique nature-inspired mockup scene. It’s perfect for all sorts of vouchers, coupons, and other types of card design presentations.

Free Gift Voucher Mockup

This is a simple gift voucher mockup scene that you can fully customize to your preference. The template includes easily editable smart object layers and changeable backgrounds as well.

Free Ticket & Coupon Mockup

This is a collection of 5 creative coupon mockup templates that come in multiple variations and arrangements. You can use these to showcase your tickets, coupons, and vouchers like a pro.

Free Discount Voucher Mockup

Another free voucher mockup with a stylish design. This mockup features a beautiful scene with lots of editable elements. Placing your designs in the mockup is also easy thanks to smart object layers.

The <select> element is a fairly straightforward concept: focus on it to reveal a set of <option>s that can be selected as the input’s value. That’s a great pattern and I’m not suggesting we change it. That said, I do enjoy poking at things and found an interesting way to turn a <select> into a dial of sorts — where options are selected by scrolling them into position, not totally unlike a combination lock or iOS date pickers. Anyone who’s expanded a <select> for selecting a country knows how painfully long lists can be and this could be one way to prevent that.

Here’s what I’m talking about:

It’s fairly common knowledge that styling <select> in CSS is not the easiest thing in the world. But here’s the trick: we’re not working with <select> at all. No, we’re not going to do anything like building our own <select> by jamming a bunch of JavaScript into a <div>. We’re still working with semantic form controls, only it’s radio buttons.

<section class=scroll-container>
  <label for="madrid" class="scroll-item">
      Madrid 
      <abbr>MAD</abbr>
      <input id="madrid" type="radio" name="items">
  </label>
  <label for="malta" class="scroll-item">
      Malta 
      <abbr>MLA</abbr>
      <input id="malta" type="radio" name="items">
  </label>
  <!-- etc. -->
</section>

What we need is to style the list of selectable controls where we are capable of managing their sizes and spacing in CSS. I’ve gone with a group of labels with nested radio boxes as far as the markup goes. The exact styling is totally up to you, of course, but you can use these base styles I wrote up if you want a starting point.

.scroll-container {
  /* SIZING & LAYOUT */
  --itemHeight: 60px;
  --itemGap: 10px;
  --containerHeight: calc((var(--itemHeight) * 7) + (var(--itemGap) * 6));

  width: 400px; 
  height: var(--containerHeight);
  align-items: center;
  row-gap: var(--itemGap);
  border-radius: 4px;

  /* PAINT */
  --topBit: calc((var(--containerHeight) - var(--itemHeight))/2);
  --footBit: calc((var(--containerHeight) + var(--itemHeight))/2);

  background: linear-gradient(
    rgb(254 251 240), 
    rgb(254 251 240) var(--topBit), 
    rgb(229 50 34 / .5) var(--topBit), 
    rgb(229 50 34 / .5) var(--footBit), 
    rgb(254 251 240) 
    var(--footBit));
  box-shadow: 0 0 10px #eee;
}

A couple of details on this:

• --itemHeight is the height of each item in the list.
• --itemGap is meant to be the space between two items.
• The --containerHeight variable is the .scroll-container’s height. It’s the sum of the item sizes and the gaps between them, ensuring that we display, at maximum, seven items at once. (An odd number of items gives us a nice balance where the selected item is directly in the vertical center of the list). 
• The background is a striped gradient that highlights the middle area, i.e., the location of the currently selected item. 
•  The --topBit and –-footBit variables are color stops that visually paint in the middle area (which is orange in the demo) to represent the currently selected item.

I’ll arrange the controls in a vertical column with flexbox declared on the .scroll-container:

.scroll-container {
  display: flex; 
  flex-direction: column;
  /* rest of styles */
}

With layout work done, we can focus on the scrolling part of this. If you haven’t worked with CSS Scroll Snapping before, it’s a convenient way to direct a container’s scrolling behavior. For example, we can tell the .scroll-container that we want to enable scrolling in the vertical direction. That way, it’s possible to scroll to the rest of the items that are not in view.

.scroll-container {
  overflow-y: scroll;
  /* rest of styles */
}

Next, we reach for the scroll-snap-style property that can be used to tell the .scroll-container that we want scrolling to stop on an item — not near an item, but directly on it.

.scroll-container {
  overflow-y: scroll;
  scroll-snap-type: y mandatory;
  /* rest of styles */
}

Now items “snap” onto an item instead of allowing a scroll to end wherever it wants. One more little detail I like to include is overscroll-behavior, specifically along the y-axis as far as this demo goes:

.scroll-container {
  overflow-y: scroll;
  scroll-snap-type: y mandatory;
  overscroll-behavior-y: none;
  /* rest of styles */
}

overscroll-behavior-y: none isn’t required to make this work, but when someone scrolls through the .scroll-container (along the y-axis), scrolling stops once the boundary is reached, and any further continued scrolling action will not trigger scrolling in any nearby scroll containers. Just a form of defensive CSS.

Time to move to the items inside the scroll container. But before we go there, here are some base styles for the items themselves that you can use as a starting point:

.scroll-item {
  /* SIZING & LAYOUT */
  width: 90%;
  box-sizing: border-box;
  padding-inline: 20px;
  border-radius: inherit; 

  /* PAINT & FONT */
  background: linear-gradient(to right, rgb(242 194 66), rgb(235 122 51));
  box-shadow: 0 0 4px rgb(235 122 51);
  font: 16pt/var(--itemHeight) system-ui;
  color: #fff;

  input { appearance: none; } 
  abbr { float: right; } /* The airport code */
}

As I mentioned earlier, the --itemHeight variable is setting as the size of each item and we’re declaring it on the flex property — flex: 0 0 var(--itemHeight). Margin is added before and after the first and last items, respectively, so that every item can reach the middle of the container through scrolling. 

The scroll-snap-align property is there to give the .scroll-container a snap point for the items. A center alignment, for instance, snaps an item’s center (vertical center, in this case) with the .scroll-container‘s center (vertical center as well). Since the items are meant to be selected through scrolling alone pointer-events: none is added to prevent selection from clicks.

One last little styling detail is to set a new background on an item when it is in a :checked state:

.scroll-item {
  /* Same styles as before */

  /* If input="radio" is :checked */
  &:has(:checked) {
    background: rgb(229 50 34);
  }
}

But wait! You’re probably wondering how in the world an item can be :checked when we’re removing pointer-events. Good question! We’re all finished with styling, so let’s move on to figuring some way to “select” an item purely through scrolling. In other words, whatever item scrolls into view and “snaps” into the container’s vertical center needs to behave like a typical form control selection. Yes, we’ll need JavaScript for that. 

let observer = new IntersectionObserver(entries => { 
  entries.forEach(entry => {
    with(entry) if(isIntersecting) target.children[1].checked = true;
  });
}, { 
  root: document.querySelector(`.scroll-container`), rootMargin: `-51% 0px -49% 0px`
});

document.querySelectorAll(`.scroll-item`).forEach(item => observer.observe(item));

The IntersectionObserver object is used to monitor (or “observe”) if and when an element (called a target) crosses through (or “intersects”) another element. That other element could be the viewport itself, but in this case, we’re observing the .scroll-container for when a .scroll-item intersects it. We’ve established the observed boundary with rootMargin:"-51% 0px -49% 0px".  

A callback function is executed when that happens, and we can use that to apply changes to the target element, which is the currently selected .scroll-item. In our case, we want to select a .scroll-item that is at the halfway mark in the .scroll-container: target.children[1].checked = true.

That completes the code. Now, as we scroll through the items, whichever one snaps into the center position is the selected item. Here’s a look at the final demo again:

Let’s say that, instead of selecting an item that snaps into the .scroll-container‘s vertical center, the selection point we need to watch is the top of the container. No worries! All we do is update the scroll-snap-align property value from center to start in the CSS and remove the :first-of-type‘s top margin. From there, it’s only a matter of updating the scroll container’s background gradient so that the color stops highlight the top instead of the center. Like this:

And if one of the items has to be pre-selected when the page loads, we can get its position in JavaScript (getBoundingClientRect()) and use the scrollTo() method to scroll the container to where that specific item’s position is at the point of selection (which we’ll say is the center in keeping with our original demo). We’ll append a .selected class on that .scroll-item. 

<section class="scroll-container">
  <!-- more items -->
  <label class="scroll-items selected">
    2024
    <input type=radio name=items />
  </label>

  <!-- more items -->
</section>

Let’s select the .selected class, get its dimensions, and automatically scroll to it on page load:

let selected_item = (document.querySelector(".selected")).getBoundingClientRect();
let scroll_container = document.querySelector(".scroll-container");
scroll_container.scrollTo(0, selected_item.top - scroll_container.offsetHeight - selected_item.height);

It’s a little tough to demo this in a typical CodePen embed, so here’s a live demo in a GitHub Page (source code). I’ll drop a video in as well:

That’s it! You can build up this control or use it as a starting point to experiment with different layouts, styles, animations, and such. It’s important the UX clearly conveys to the users how the selection is done and which item is currently selected. And if I was doing this in a production environment, I’d want to make sure there’s a good fallback experience for when JavaScript might be unavailable and that my markup performs well on a screen reader.

References and further reading

• A Few Functional Uses for Intersection Observer to Know When an Element is in View (Preethi Sam)
• An Explanation of How the Intersection Observer Watches (Travis Almand)
• Practical CSS Scroll Snapping (Max Kohler)
• The Current State of Styling Selects in 2019 (Chris Coyier)
• CSS Flexbox Layout Guide (CSS-Tricks)
• CSS flex property (CSS-Tricks)
• CSS Scroll Snap Properties (MDN)
• scrollTo() (MDN)

How to Make a “Scroll to Select” Form Control originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

In modern web applications, scalability is crucial for handling increasing traffic and data efficiently. Laravel’s job queues offer a powerful way to manage tasks that need to be processed asynchronously, helping your application stay responsive and performant. In this blog, we’ll explore how Laravel’s job queues work and how you can implement them to unlock …

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Over the last decade, I’ve helped set and track marketing goals for B2B businesses of all kinds — And I’ve come to think of them more as destinations.

They’re points on the map your team wants to reach. And B2B marketing KPIs (key performance indicators)? Well, they’re how you measure how far you’ve gone and just how far you have left.

You can measure trips in miles, hours, or even how many Spotify playlists you’ve gone through. Similarly, there are dozens of KPIs to measure progress toward our marketing goals — but don’t worry; there’s no need to guess and check.

Regardless of industry or audience, there are some KPIs everyone should be tracking, and I’ve compiled them for you here. We’ll define them, why they’re important, and how to track them effectively.

Table of Contents

• What are B2B marketing KPIs?

• Why track B2B Marketing KPIs and metrics?

• B2B Marketing KPIs and Metrics

• How to Report Your B2B Marketing KPIs and Metrics

What are B2B marketing KPIs?

As HubSpot contributor Rebecca Riserbato explains, a key performance indicator (KPI) “measures how your company is performing regarding certain long-term goals or objectives.”

That means B2B marketing KPIs are data points marketers use to monitor and measure the progress of their business-to-business (B2B) marketing initiatives (e.g., website campaigns or email marketing).

It kind of sounds like a metric, doesn’t it? But — plot twist — they’re not the same.

B2B Marketing KPIs vs. B2B Marketing Metrics

Every time I’ve set marketing goals, I’ve needed a refresher on the difference between marketing KPIs and metrics. Many people even use them interchangeably, but this is a little misguided.

KPIs and metrics are similar and work together but have very different responsibilities — like sales and marketing, design and development, or forks and spoons.

Image Source

KPIs are focused on the big picture. They relate directly to your business’s larger long-term goals and are the same across departments.

Metrics are related to business goals, too, but they zero in on specific tactics and initiatives used to accomplish them and tend to change by department.

To use our travel example again, your KPI could be visiting all of Italy in a month. However, your metrics would be tracking individual cities or regions you need to visit to accomplish that.

Thinking of business: say you want to increase your number of new customers by 25% this year. That’s your KPI.

Your marketing metrics would be the click-through rate of the social media ads you run to try to generate new leads or the open rate of the email campaigns you run.

But why do we even need to track any of these things?

Why track B2B marketing KPIs and metrics?

Simply put, B2B marketing KPIs tell you what your team is working toward and where everything it does needs to lead. They give you direction.

They help guide your strategy by giving you something to point to and ask, “Is this going to help get us to that goal?”

Marketing metrics go even further. These measurements can help you:

• Track progress toward your goals
• Gather customer/audience insights
• Evaluate the effectiveness of your work/creative
• Improve conversion rates
• Plan more effective future campaigns
• Prove return on investment (ROI)
• Incentivize teams
• Make better business decisions

I’ve always liked to say that marketing is a happy marriage of creativity — and science and metrics are the keys to this.

B2B Marketing KPIs and Metrics to Track

Now that you know why tracking B2B marketing KPIs and metrics is important, which ones should you focus on?

Specifics will depend on your organization’s specific campaigns and company goals, but here are 24 of the most important based on some of the most popular marketing initiatives.

Need help tracking your KPIs? HubSpot’s KPI Software can help you build dashboards, create and send automated reports, and track KPIs to measure your teams' performance and drive improvement over time.

Website Performance KPIs and Metrics

According to our 2024 State of Marketing report, company websites/blogs/SEO have resulted in the biggest ROI for marketers in the past year, which likely comes as no surprise.

For many, your website is the center of all your content marketing and even sales. Website KPIs and metrics help you make sure it's performing to the level you need it to.

1. Website Traffic: This is the volume of users visiting a website.

Why is it important? Your company website is the hub of many modern businesses. Even if it’s not where people are making actual purchases, it’s where they come to learn more about what you do and often even initiate sales conversations.

Understanding traffic helps you gauge interest and potential for sales activity. In terms of specific metrics, you can track:

• Unique Visits: Total number of unique individuals who click on one or more web pages in a visit.
• Page Views: Total number of web pages viewed, including individually refreshed pages.
• Traffic Source: Where your website visitors come from (i.e., email, social media, search engine)

How to calculate and track it? You can track your website traffic through a number of different tools. In my experience, a combination of HubSpot Analytics and Google Analytics is most effective for businesses using HubSpot tools.

In HubSpot, you can easily view your page views and sessions filtered by time frame or source.

2. Bounce Rate: This is the percentage of website visitors that click on one page and leave.

Why is it important? Bounce rate can help you gauge if your website is delivering what it needs to achieve your goals. If your bounce rate is low, that could mean that people are interested and engaged in your website.

They’re staying and clicking around.

If it’s high, it could mean either your website is not what someone was looking for or didn’t deliver what they wanted, or they immediately found what they needed and could leave.

How to calculate and track it? This is another KPI you can track for specific website pages, landing pages, and blogs in HubSpot. Here’s how it can appear in the analytics of a blog article.

3. Conversions: How many visitors took your desired action on your website, like subscribing to your newsletter or making a purchase.

(It’s also the most important marketing metric if you ask me.)

Why is it important? Leads and new contacts are fuel for your marketing and sales funnel. When someone fills out a form on your website, they’ve shown an active interest in what you offer and want to connect with your business.

It’s a crucial first action to put the rest of your marketing and nurturing activities into motion. People can convert on several different things, so this may mean tracking:

• Form Conversion Rate (or visit to form submission): This is the percentage of website visitors that submit a form. (Formula: Form conversion rate = (total form conversions / total visitors) x 100)
• Number of Form Submissions: This is how many times forms were submitted on your website.
• Number of New Contacts: How many new contacts has your website generated.
• Visit to New Contact: This is what percentage of visits to your website resulted in a new contact.

How to calculate and track it? HubSpot or any tool you use to host your forms or landing pages should provide you with calculated conversion rates automatically, but even if they don’t, you can calculate yours with this formula:

Conversion Rate = Total number of conversions /

Number of visitors (or submissions, clicks, etc.) x 100

Sales and Marketing Pipeline

Once someone fills out a form on your website, they enter your sales and marketing pipeline to be nurtured toward making a purchase.

63% of B2B marketers report tracking their marketing/sales funnel as KPIs and metrics, and with their direct correlation to revenue, they should be.

4. Number of Leads (or Leads In): This is the total number of contacts generated by your campaigns that could buy from you.

Why is it important? Similar to your number of new contacts, this tells you how many new people you have to nurture towards a purchase. However, they’re different in that these contacts have the qualities that signal it could turn into a customer.

Think of it this way: If you sell enterprise software, a college student could become a contact after downloading a report on your website for a class project, but they can’t buy from you. That said, they are a contact but not a lead.

How to calculate and track it? What criteria actually makes someone qualify as a lead is up to your business, but once you have that set, you can use HubSpot Lead Scoring to identify these contacts.

From there, you can create an active list in HubSpot to automatically segment these leads and keep an eye on the size of that list.

5. Cost Per Lead (CPL): This is the total number of dollars it takes to acquire a potential customer.

Why is it important? HubSpot’s Jay Fuchs explains, “Generally speaking, [CPL] is used to gauge the efficacy of individual campaigns — via channels like Google ads, email marketing, or social media — but it can also help you understand whether you're getting the most out of your marketing spend as a whole.”

In other words, this can help you determine if your marketing campaign is cost-effective. If it costs more to bring in a lead than you’ll make off it, that campaign was not worth your time.

How to calculate and track it? You’ll need to calculate this on your own or through a spreadsheet. Use this formula:

Cost of Lead Generation/Total Number of Leads = Cost per Lead

Fuchs explains this formula in detail in “How to Calculate & Apply Cost per Lead (CPL).”

6. Close Rate (or Lead to Closing Rate): This is the percentage of leads that eventually become customers.

Why is it important? Your close rate can help gauge the quality of the leads you’re bringing in as well as your sales process.

If your close rate is high, things are going well. If not, you may need to re-evaluate your lead criteria or sales behavior.

How to calculate and track it? This is another KPI you’ll need to calculate on your own or through a spreadsheet. Use this formula:

Close Rate =

(number of leads that closed as sales / total number of leads) x 100

7. Number of MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads): The number of leads engaged with your company’s marketing and have the potential to become a more serious prospect.

Why is it important? MQLs help your marketing team understand how many leads they're bringing in and if they’re quality leads.

How to calculate and track it? Like number of leads, you can use a combination of HubSpot Lead Scoring, an active list in HubSpot, and workflows to automatically segment these leads and keep an eye on the size of that list. Learn more about MQLs.

8. Number of SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads): Number of prospective customers ready to talk to someone on your sales team.

Why is it important? SQLs have usually expressed enough interest in your product or service to be ready to move into your sales process. Tracking this number lets you know how many people your sales team is currently working with.

It also provides valuable insight into which marketing efforts generate the most sales activity.

How to calculate and track it? Once again, you can use a combination of HubSpot Lead Scoring, an active list in HubSpot, and workflows to automatically segment these SQLs and keep an eye on the size of that list. Learn more about SQLs.

Pro Tip: If your marketing and website are hosted on HubSpot, our Dashboard & Reporting software is a user-friendly, single source of truth for all this data.

9. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The amount of money it takes to convert a potential lead into a customer.

Why is it important? Like CPL, CAC tells you how cost-efficient your marketing and sales processes are. You don’t want to be spending more on getting customers than you are making from them.

How to calculate and track it? Information from HubSpot can help guide this calculation, but ultimately, this is another you’ll need to calculate it on your own or through a spreadsheet. Use this formula:

CAC = marketing spend/number of new customers resulting from campaign

10. Customer lifetime value (CLV): The total amount of revenue a business can expect to make from a single customer.

Why is it important? Knowing how much you’ll make from a customer is helpful when determining how much you can spend trying to close them. In other words, this is a useful metric to compare to CAC. If your CAC is higher than your LTV, you're likely spending too much money acquiring customers and need to revisit your strategy.

The higher the CLV, the more valuable the customer from a financial standpoint.

How to calculate and track it? Calculate this KPI on your own or through a spreadsheet using the formula:

Customer lifetime value =

average transaction size x number of transactions x retention period

11. Monthly recurring revenue (MRR): This is the amount of revenue a business receives from a customer each month, such as for a subscription-based service or consulting retainer.

Why is it important? This is how much money you are “guaranteed” to have each month from your customers. It allows you to plan budgets and make other financial predictions.

How to calculate and track it? Information from HubSpot can help guide this calculation, but ultimately, this is another you’ll need to calculate it on your own or through a spreadsheet. Use this formula:

Monthly recurring revenue =

average revenue per customer x total number of customers

12. Net Promoter Score (NPS): This is a measurement of customer satisfaction using a scale of 1-10 to gauge how likely a customer would recommend your business to a friend. (10 being extremely likely, 1 being unlikely)

Why is it important? NPS gives you a good idea of how happy customers are with their purchase and how likely they are to buy again or stick around. Plus, referrals, recommendations, and other forms of word-of-mouth can lead to quick closes, so you want to make sure your customers want to give them.

How to calculate and track it? Owl Lab’s Sophia Bernazzani Barron recommends calculating NPS using these three steps:

1. Survey your customers and ask them, “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?”

2. Categorize respondents according to their score: Scores 0-6 are Detractors, 7-8 are Passives, and 9-10 are Promoters.

3. Disregarding the Passives, subtract the percentage of Detractor responses from the percentage of Promoter responses to determine your Net Promoter Score. This score can range from -100 to 100.

13. Return on Investment (ROI): the amount of money you gain from your marketing efforts compared to their cost.

Why is it important? You never want to spend more than you make. Like CPL and CAC, calculating and tracking your marketing ROI can help you determine how you are performing in that regard.

How to calculate and track it? You can calculate your ROI using this formula:

ROI =

(Total Revenue - Total Investment) / Total Investment

Learn more about calculating marketing ROI.

Email Marketing KPIs and Metrics

14. Number of Email Contacts (or Email List Size): This is how many people in your database have opted into email marketing and communication from you.

Why is it important? Email marketing is not dead. In fact, 77% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months, so your email list size does matter. The more email contacts you have, the more people you can reach with targeted campaigns.

Read: Email Marketing: The Ultimate Guide (Expert Tips + Data to Know)

How to calculate and track it? You should be able to see the total number of contacts in your database using any of your email marketing tools, including HubSpot. In HubSpot, navigate to CRM > Contacts and see the total number of records below the header.

But this number may not always be accurate. It also includes contacts whose email addresses you have but perhaps have unsubscribed.

Knowing this, I recommend having an active list in HubSpot, pulling all of the CRM's subscribed and engaged contacts.

15. Email Open Rate: The percentage of people opening your marketing emails.

Why is it important? There’s no point in sending an email if people aren’t opening and reading it. This metric lets you know how successful you are at this or if you need to adjust your subject line, send time, or sender, among other things.

How to calculate and track it? This is another metric that should be easily found in any mainstream email marketing tool.

In HubSpot, you just need to navigate to the email in question, click “actions,” then “view performance,” and you’ll find the open rate called out right below the header.

If your tool doesn’t provide this metric or you use a personal email client, you can calculate your open rate using this formula:

Email open rate =

(number of emails opened / total number of emails delivered) x 100

Note: While you can certainly calculate email metrics on your own, it’s next to impossible to know exactly how many people opened your email without a third-party tool.

So, even if you don’t have the budget, I recommend investing in a free email marketing tool to track your metrics more easily.

16. Email click-through rate (CTR): This is how many people click a link in the email you sent out of those who opened it.

Why is it important? An open is one thing, but the click is what you’re really after with email marketing. CTR tells you just how effectively your email copy convinced someone to take action.

How to calculate and track it? Like open rate, CTR can be found prominently in your email performance page or dashboard like here in HubSpot:

You can also calculate your CTR using this formula:

Email clickthrough rate =

(number of email clicks / total number of emails delivered) x 100

Like opens, this can be difficult to measure without a formal email marketing tool. If you opt not to use an email marketing tool like HubSpot or MailChimp, use bit.ly or other UTM tracking tools to create trackable URLs.

Social Media KPIs and Metrics

According to our research, social media ties with a company’s website or blog as the top ROI-driving channel for marketers in the past 12 months. So, it’s important to know how you’re performing there.

Organic social media is usually best suited to boosting brand awareness and engaging your audience, while paid social media can generate big results in sales and more.

The KPIs I recommend for both reflect that, but you can dig deeper into social media analytics in our ultimate guide.

17. Social media reach (following): Total number of followers across social media or per platform.

Why is it important? Like an email subscriber, a social media follower “opts in " to stay in contact with your business and hear more about what your brand has to offer.

This number gives you a good estimate of your initial reach on social media before things like engagement and hashtags.

How to calculate and track it? Most social media tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, and SproutSocial have tools to monitor your followings on multiple platforms. HubSpot will track this for Facebook, Instagram, X, and your LinkedIn Company page if connected.

To view yours, navigate to “Marketing,” “Social,” then “Analyze.”

18. Social media engagement: This measures how many interactions your posts on social media are getting.

Why is it important? Social media is all about connecting and one of the biggest indicators that your content is successfully connecting with your audience is engagement. Engagement is also often a big factor in social media algorithms.

The more engagement a post gets, the more likely it is to get shared to explore and discovery feeds.

Some common social media engagement metrics include:

• Likes
• Comments
• Shares or Retweets
• Messages
• Tags or Mentions
• Replies
• Impressions or views
• Plays

How to calculate and track it? Again, most social media management tools can monitor your followings on multiple platforms, as does HubSpot.

HubSpot shows you clicks, shares, impressions, and interactions (likes, reactions, and comments) of both posts published via its tools and directly on Facebook, Instagram, X, or a LinkedIn Company page.

Paid Ads Performance

If you’re looking for more bottom-of-the-funnel impact from your social media, paid advertising is likely in your strategy. All major platforms including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube offer advertising options.

Here are some of the metrics you should be tracking to get the highest social media advertising ROI.

19. Impressions: This is how many times your ad gets seen.

Why is it important? Reach is a huge metric when it comes to any type of advertising and impressions is a reflection of that.

If you’re investing with the goal of increasing brand awareness, you’ll especially want to make sure you’re getting a healthy amount of impressions.

How to calculate and track it? This is something your advertising platform will share with you. However, if you use HubSpot to manage your Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google ads, you can see them there as well.

20. Click rate: The percentage of clicks your ad gets compared to how many times it is seen.

Why is it important? Getting noticed is good, but eliciting action is even better. Your click rate helps identify just how successful you are at that.

Plus, if the goal of your ad is to generate traffic or leads, you need to make sure this number is healthy to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth.

How to calculate and track it? Like impressions, this is something your advertising platform will share with you, but you can also calculate it using this formula:

Click Rate = number of clicks / number of impressions x 100

21. Lead rate (or lead conversion rate): The percentage of impressions that turned into leads from your ad.

Why is it important? If the goal of your social media advertising is to generate leads, this should be your number one metric. However, even if it’s not, this can tell you a great deal about how compelling your ad copy or creative is.

If your lead rate is high and that wasn’t your goal, there’s something working well with the ad that you should take note of.

How to calculate and track it? Again, this is something your advertising platform will share with you, but you can also calculate it using this formula:

Lead Conversion Rate = (Number of Leads Generated / Total Number of Impressions or Visitors) x 100

Note: If your goal is leads, you’ll also want to track the number of leads generated from your ads.

22. Cost per impression (CPM): How much you’re spending to generate an impression from your advertising. Impressions are typically billed by the thousand.

Why is it important? This metric tells you how cost-effective your advertising spend is. You should not be spending more on generating impressions than you are making from them.

How to calculate and track it? Again, this is something your advertising platform will share with you, but you can also calculate it using this formula:

CPM = Total cost of campaign / number of impressions x 1000

23. Cost per lead: How much you’re spending to generate a lead from advertising.

Why is it important? This metric tells you how cost-effective your advertising spend is if you’re focused on generating leads.

How to calculate and track it? Again, this is something your specific advertising platform will share with you, but you can also calculate it using this formula:

Cost Per Lead = Total cost of campaign / number of leads

24. Return On Ad Spend (ROAS): The revenue generated from a social media advertising campaign compared to every dollar you spend. It's usually a ratio.

Why is it important? No big revelation here: You want to make sure you’re making more money from your advertising than you are spending.

How to calculate and track it? You can calculate your ROAS using this formula:

ROAS=

Revenue generated from ads / cost of ads (ad spend)

HubSpot will also tell you this for your LinkedIn, Google, and Facebook Ads as “ROI.”

How to Report Your B2B Marketing KPIs and Metrics

Data without meaning is useless.

That’s why once you’ve identified and can successfully track all your metrics, you need a plan for analyzing and reporting findings to your team and other stakeholders.

As Allie Konchar, Partner & Head of Client Operations of digital growth agency Omniscient and former HubSpotter, explains, “Marketing reports uncover meaningful, actionable data that help you draw important conclusions and meet organization-wide goals.”

Marketing reports can be critical to informing future marketing decisions and strategies, so it’s important to learn how to create them successfully. This article by Konchar further details how to build and analyze marketing reports.

We’ve also created a collection of monthly marketing report templates to get you started. These will help you:

• Track the monthly growth of your visits, leads, and customers.
• Measure your website's visit-to-lead conversion rate.
• Accurately track which channels are performing best.
• Plug your metrics into a PowerPoint or Google Slides deck to present to your boss.

Get yours here for free.

Tracking your way to success with KPIs

Ok, I know — that was a lot. And the truth is, there are likely even more B2B marketing KPIs your team will need to track to truly have a firm grasp on its performance.

But once you’ve got the right tools and templates in place to help you make sense of everything, it’s much easier to scale and adjust your efforts. Use this list and the tips shared to get started and start tracking your way to marketing success.

Korean typography holds a unique aesthetic appeal that can transport your designs to an entirely different cultural dimension. Their unique blend of boldness and simplicity brings a distinct visual appeal that’s perfect for a variety of creative projects.

In this post, we’ve compiled a collection of the most stunning and versatile Korean fonts, each designed to bring a sense of sophistication and cultural richness to your designs. From sleek modern typefaces to more traditional, handwritten styles, these fonts are perfect for making your designs stand out while adding a subtle international flair.

Their clean lines, balanced shapes, and minimalistic style are ideal for creating logos, posters, packaging, or even social media content that requires a unique and stylish touch. Be sure to download them all.

Korean – Modern Korean Font

This font masterfully combines traditional Korean writing with a modern, sleek design for a visually engaging typeface. Ideal for various design projects, it provides a blend of elegance and cultural depth, ensuring your designs stand out. With a full set of Hangul characters, Latin letters, numbers, punctuation, and specialty characters, its versatility is unmatched.

Waom – Korean Style Font

Waom is an exquisite Korean style font that brings a dash of Asian elegance to your designs. Each letter intricately portrays beauty and delicacy, encapsulating Korea’s cultural richness. Perfect for branding, logos, and events, this unique font adds a timeless charm to your projects.

Kirame – Korean Style Font

Elevate your designs with the innate beauty of the Kirame font, which effortlessly marries Korean elegance with modern style. Exuding an enchanting Asian charm, every character of Kirame resonates tenderness, making it an ideal choice for branding initiatives, logo typography or any project that seeks to capture the rich allure of Korean culture.

Itaewon – Korean Modern Font

Itaewon is a compelling display typeface inspired by Hangul, the symbol of the lively Itaewon nightlife. Efficient in providing a unique twist to Korean-themed projects such as branding and restaurant menus, it supports uppercase/lowercase variants and multiple languages. Formats available are OTF, TTF, and WOFF.

Seoul – Authentic Korean Font

The Seoul font is an impressive, robust display font that captures the essence of traditional Korean letters. Perfect for a multitude of uses, it can enhance travelogues, poetry, movie titles, food-related content, quotes, brand identities, and more! The Seoul font package includes OTF, TTF, and WOFF versions, along with basic Latin alphabets, numbers, and punctuation.

Namra – Korean Style Display Font

Namra is an appealing typeface inspired by Korean text, perfect for jazzing up your posters. Apart from posters, it’s also ideal for logos, stickers, jerseys, invitation cards, brochures, and more. It comes as one Otf file, though please note it doesn’t include a thumbnail cover.

Korean – Futurstic Helvetica Font

This is a stunning and dynamic Korean font that merges elegance and minimalism. Its unique curves at the end of each letter ornament signify it’s ready for both present and future designs. Ideal for branding, invitations, posters, brochures and more, this versatile font ensures clarity while attracting attention. Its blend of serif and sans styles promise distinct, visually appealing results.

Kpop Vibes – Korean Style Font

Kpop Vibes is a creative, Korean-style font that mirrors the vibrant culture and growing impact of Korea on the global scene. This sans-serif typeface, in both regular and italic styles, brings together bold, unique graphic design trends. Its versatile features include uppercase, lowercase, numbers, punctuation, and multi-lingual support.

Kinserim – Korean Style Font

Kinserim is a captivating Korean font that enriches your branding, logos, and various design pursuits with its enchanting Asian allure. It’s more than just a font—it is a salute to Korean culture, enveloping your projects with the timeless elegance of Eastern charm.  It’s the perfect blend of functionality and aesthetic mastery that supports multilingual content.

Seoul – Modern Korean Font

This is a modern Korean font that artfully merges elegance with a contemporary style. Ideal for design projects needing a touch of sophistication, “Seoul” offers a sleek and clean aesthetic with a full set of Korean and Latin characters, numerals and punctuation. Perfect for everything from branding to digital media, it adds a professional and unique touch to any design project.

Hyunso – Creative Korean Font

Hyunso, a creative Korean style display font, draws its inspiration from the title series, All of Us Are Dead. Worthy of your posters and suitable for designing logos, stickers, invitations, jerseys, and brochures, this new offering from IHDSTD is a single Otf file that doesn’t include a thumbnail cover. Embrace Hyunso for a unique, stylish touch to your creative projects.

Annyeong – Cute Korean Font

Annyeong is a vibrant Korean font that embodies the dynamism and allure of Korean design, providing a unique touch of cultural richness to your designs. Its generously sized characters ensure a powerful visual impact while its bold weight brings solidity to your creative projects. Perfect for headlines, logos and more, Annyeong offers multi-lingual support, stylish sets, numerals and punctuations in OTF, TTF and WOFF formats.

Bosan Mirull – Korean Style Font

Bosan Mirull is a Korean-style font that beautifully captures the essence of Korea’s rich culture in its design. Ideal for branding projects, logo typography, and special events, it adds a unique Asian flair to your work. This font comes with OTF, TTF, WOFF, WOFF2, CSS, HTML file fonts, all glyphs, variations and multilingual support.

Hello Seoul – Korean Font

Hello Seoul is a sleek and modern Korean font, known for its crisp rectangular shapes and sharp corners that symbolize Seoul’s dynamic spirit. This non-heavy display font offers a fresh, structured aesthetic ideal for various design needs like logos, headlines, posters, and branding materials. Features include multilingual support, alternates, and encoded numerals and punctuations.

Konijhipa – Korean Textured Font

Check out Konijhipa, a beautifully textured, flowing Korean font that’s sure to elevate your next design project. This font’s blend of unique ligatures and modern swirly embedding lends an elegant flair, backed by features like multilingual support, compatibility with both PC and Mac, and simple installation. Available in OTF, TTF, and WOFF formats, Konijhipa is a creative addition to your design toolkit.

Yeongest – Korean Style Font

Yeongest is a captivating Korean style font that adds an Asian charm to every project. Each letter shines with elegance, embodying the richness of Korea’s culture. Offering flexibility across numerous formats, from OTF to HTML, Yeongest has all glyphs and variations. With multilingual support and fully accessible PUA Encoded Characters, Yeongest is an excellent choice for branding, logo typography, and special events that aim to embody a timeless beauty.

Busan Garden – Korean Font

Busan Garden is a Korean font with a bold, immersive style that channels the spirit and aesthetics of Busan. With its sturdy, confident letterforms and sharp angles, it’s a font that commands attention. It’s versatile and supports multiple languages, numerals, and punctuations. Perfect for headlines, logos, and other design projects, Busan Garden isn’t just a font—it’s a journey through the streets of Busan.

Gonggi Notes – Cute Korean Font

Gonggi Notes is a captivating Korean font with modern appeal. Its rich and sturdy lettering delivers a strong presence, while maintaining a delightful roundness for approachable charm. This font brings a touch of Korean culture to your designs, and supports alternate characters, multiple languages and includes various punctuations and numerals. Ideal for headlining, branding, and various print applications, the Gonggi Notes font offers versatility in creative design.

Daebak Mrow – Korean Style Font

Embrace the allure of Korean culture with Daebak Mrow, a font styled in the spirit of Asian elegance. With its soft, warm curves, this unique Korean style font greatly enhances the charm of your design projects. Effortless to grasp, Daebak Mrow brings out the calming, mesmerizing, and timeless beauty of Korea in branding, logos, and events.

Chaewon – Korean Style Display Font

Chaewon is a remarkable Korean font that can add a stylishly ethnic touch to your projects. It’s not just for posters but also works beautifully for logos, stickers, jerseys, invitation cards, brochures, and more. You get 1 OTF file in this package.

Moncbla – Korean Style Font

The Moncbla brings a touch of Asian elegance to your designs. This charming, yet modern, font features a distinctively Korean flair, adding beauty and tenderness to each character. Ideal for brand projects and events where a unique Asian aura is desired. The package includes OTF, TTF, WOFF, WOFF2, CSS, HTML file fonts and multiple glyph variations.

Bocan – Korean Calligraphy Font

The Bocan is a creative font inspired by Korean movie posters and cover designs, offering a stylish and unique element for your design projects. It serves as a great tool to incorporate a Korean aesthetic into various contexts, including posters, sale signs, advertisements, and social media campaigns. Provided in both regular and outline styles, the Bocan font features a comprehensive character set, including numerals, punctuations, and ligatures, supporting multilingual use.

Free Korean Fonts

Jonyock – Free Korean Style Font

This free font comes with a stylish Korean-style letter design that will allow you to craft beautiful typography that fits perfectly with various types of design projects. It’s especially great for restaurant and food packaging designs. It’s free to use with personal projects.

Utonaf  – Free Korean Font

This free font features a creative square-shaped letter design with Korean-themed letterforms. The font is ideal for fun and casual designs including social media posts, T-shirts, flyers, and more. It’s free for personal use only.

Wefumi – Free Korean Font

You can download this font for free to craft attractive titles and headings for your cute and fun designs. The font has a cute Korean-themed letter design that will fit perfectly for packaging and branding designs. It’s free for personal use.

Hangul – Free Korean Style Font

Hangul is a stylish Korean-style font that comes with a modern and futuristic-style letter design. This font is ideal for technology and traditional-themed designs. You can use it freely with personal and commercial projects.

Tenada – Free Korean Font

Tenada is another creative font with a set of Stencil-style letters. It takes inspiration from Korean-style typography and features stylistic elements that give each letter a unique identity. The font is completely free to use with commercial projects.