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How to effectively brainstorm in a remote environment

One of the things that seemed most challenging when AWeber was transitioning from a physical location to becoming a remote team was figuring out how we’d effectively brainstorm. So much good creative work comes from people putting their heads together, identifying problems to be solved, and coming up with ways to solve them.

Historically at AWeber, we had done this by swinging by someone’s desk, or catching them in a common space and working things through on a white board. How could we maintain this free-flowing innovation when people weren’t in the same physical space (or even the same time zone)?

It turns out it’s easier than we thought it would be. We ended up finding the parts of in-person brainstorms that worked best and combining them with the principles that make asynchronous communication so transparent, clear, and inclusive.

Here are a few tips for brainstorming with a remote team.

Always start with documentation.

Whether you’re going to be brainstorming synchronously or asynchronously, documentation is necessary to make sure people have shared goals and understand their role. Your first step should be to create a document that lists:

The goal of the brainstorm. Are you trying to solve a problem? Identify what is causing a change in your user behavior? Create a new feature?

Relevant documentation.It’s helpful to share things like user research, conversations with users, and data about user behavior. Share these with your teammates before the meeting.The agenda. We have a team policy of declining agenda-less meetings (and think you should too!). The lack of an agenda makes it much more difficult for team members to prepare and results in less effective meetings.

These meeting notes are also where you close the loop and share the ideas and outcomes from your brainstorm. Having this doc is the single most effective way you can increase transparency and participation around your early stage thinking about a problem.

Gut check whether you need a meeting at all.

I’ve been surprised by the number of interesting ideas we’ve been able to come up with and refine asynchronously. Ask yourself a few questions before you schedule a meeting:

Are you “starting from zero?” You’re at the very early stages of identifying a problem or are in the freewheeling early stages of proposing solutions.

Do you need...

https://blog.aweber.com/culture/remote

How to Include a Physical Address in Your Emails Without Revealing Where You Live

Adding your business's — or your own — physical address to all your emails is a required step when you set up your first email campaign.

It makes some people a little nervous. "What if someone comes to my house?"

Fortunately, there are ways to meet this requirement without revealing where you live or risking a fine.

But first, let's explain why you have to include that physical address.

CAN-SPAM law and physical email address

Everybody hates spam emails. (Especially us!) And adding a physical address to your emails is one of the best ways to stop spammers and reduce how many unwanted emails we all get in our inboxes.

The U.S. anti-spam law called CAN-SPAM was enacted in 2003. It set up a number of requirements and restrictions on sending emails, one of which includes the physical address requirement.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) describes this requirement as follows:

Tell recipients where you’re located. Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.

Here's what a physical address would look like in the footer of an email.

Every email you send to an email marketing list has to have a physical address included in the email footer.

There are usually a lot of questions about this, so let's cover the most common ones:

Can I use a fake address to get around the CAN-SPAM Act?

Do NOT do this. You risk a $46,517 fine per violation — per subscriber — if you violate this rule. And yes — people really have had to pay fines like that. And they had to pay them for each email in violation of the Act.Even if the Feds don't come after you, if your email marketing service finds out, they could ban you from ever using their service again. Email service providers (like AWeber) make their living by providing a spam-free, CAN-SPAM-Act-complaint service. They have dozens of checks and triggers in their systems to shut spammers down fast.

Are there alternatives if I don't want to include my physical address?

Yes. You can use a business address. The business address you use could be:

A post office box (a P.O. box)The United States Postal Service offers mailbox...

https://blog.aweber.com/learn/canspam-

42 Memorial Day Instagram Captions (+7 Ready Made Images)

Since 1775, America has seen over one million casualties of war. That’s one million individuals, one million families of those individuals, and to be quite frank, one million reasons to dedicate all of your Instagram content surrounding this holiday to our fallen troops—not the summer, not the beach, not the day off of work.

So read on for Memorial Day Instagram captions and ready-to-post images you can use to pay your respects.
Table of contents

Memorial Day Instagram posts
Patriotic Memorial Day Instagram captions
Inspiring Memorial Day Instagram captions
Memorial Day facts
Memorial Day quotes
Words to use in your Memorial Day Instagram captions

Memorial Day Instagram posts & templates
All of the images in this post are in the correct 1:1 aspect ratio for Instagram. If you want to use the images as-is, open this blog post on your mobile device and save the images to your camera roll right off the post. If you want to customize them, you can access all of the images in this Canva template.

Save this image | Customize in Canva

Patriotic Memorial Day Instagram captions
Use these Memorial Day captions to remind your followers what’s at the core of this holiday.

Today we honor the men and women who died while serving in the U.S. military. The heroes of America.
Today is a day to honor the men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country, and to also support the family members of those we have lost.
Now and forever, we remember. Never forget, forever honor.
To the men and women who gave their lives protecting our freedom: We are forever in your debt. We thank you. We proudly remember you.
We can never repay, but we will ever respect, those who gave their lives for our freedom.
Today is a day to remember our fallen service members for their ultimate sacrifice.
Today and together, we proudly pay homage to those who have given given up their lives to protect our freedom.
Remember those who served. All gave some, some gave all.

Save this image | Customize in Canva

Inspiring Memorial Day Instagram captions
This category of Memorial Day Instagram captions can be used to inspire your followers to reflect a little deeper on the meaning of the holiday.

Today we remember service, sacrifice, and selflessness.
Everything you do today of your own free will, do it in remembrance of those who sacrificed their lives to make...

https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/202

Why & How to Add Hashtags to YouTube Videos (+Pro Tips)

From a novice’s perspective, hashtags are just a bunch of meaningless words added to social media content like Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. But the social media savvy know that there’s more to them—lots more.
And not just on Twitter and Instagram, but on YouTube as well.

Hashtags can improve your videos’ visibility on YouTube, but you must be strategic when using them. Carelessness in throwing these hashtags around can cause more harm than good for your content. So in this post, I’m going to walk to you through the path of effectively using hashtags for content optimization on YouTube. Read on to find out:

What YouTube hashtags are
How to add hashtags to YouTube videos
How to find YouTube hashtags
Tips and best practices for using them effectively

What are YouTube hashtags?
YouTube hashtags are words or phrases added to video titles or descriptions to denote the video’s category or topic. Just like Instagram hashtags, they are preceded by a hash (#) symbol, which makes them clickable. If a user clicks on the hashtag, they will be shown other related videos that share the same hashtag. YouTube hashtags can appear in your video description, in your video title, and above your video title.

Why use YouTube hashtags?
Ultimately, YouTube hashtags can help you get more video views, but in a few different ways.
1. Makes videos more visible
As we just mentioned, when a user clicks a hashtag, they’ll be brought to videos that contain that hashtag, even if they are not subscribed to your channel. This can help you attract a bigger audience and get more subscribers to your channel.
2. Categorize your videos without creating playlists
Organizing your videos into different playlists can help keep viewers watching your content longer, but as you create more videos, so many lists can be hard to manage. YouTube Hashtags allow you to categorize your videos in infinitely many ways, without having to create infinitely many playlists.

3. Helps with YouTube SEO
YouTube SEO is the set of practices that help your videos to rank higher in YouTube results. Similar to keywords, assigning relevant hashtags to your videos helps YouTube to understand what your video is about. The more relevancy signals you can provide, the better.
How to add hashtags to YouTube videos
Adding hashtags to your YouTube videos is not rocket science. In fact, all you...

https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/202

How to Grow Your Email List with Social Media: 10 Experts Share Their Best Tip

Social media and email marketing… are they two competing channels, completely separate? Or complementary channels that can amplify each other?

We say they can amplify each other. Big time. And so do ten of the top social media experts.

We reached out to each of these influencers because they are experts in a specific social media platform. They know their stuff, cold. We asked them for their best tip on how to grow an email list with social media right now.

These aren’t the general, tired tips you’ve heard so many times before. These are the proven, under-the-radar stuff that actually works - the same tactics these influencers have used to grow their audiences to hundreds of thousands of followers and email subscribers.Keep reading for email list growth tips from:

Mari Smith, on how to grow a list with Facebook groupsAndrea Vahl on how to get more subscribers with Facebook adsSue B. Zimmerman on how to build an email list with Instagram biosJenn Herman on how to do list building with Instagram direct messagesEstelle Keeber on growing your list with Instagram StoriesKate Hore-Lacy on how to get more subscribers with LinkedIn eventsMandy McEwen on how to build a list with LinkedIn featured linksLeah Neaderthal on how to attract subscribers with LinkedIn with multiple calls to actionMadalyn Sklar on how to build a list with Twitter’s Media StudioMeagan Williamson on how to get more email subscribers with Pinterest image pins

Mari Smith on how to grow a list with Facebook groups

261K followers on FacebookUse a Facebook group, linked to your Facebook business Page, and ask for email addresses before allowing members to join.

While this strategy doesn't create 100% conversion, you can certainly generate a solid number of qualified opt-ins. (Some group owners do make the email question required before entry). I like to ask three questions to better gauge people's interest in joining my group and how I can best serve them.

These are the questions for joining my popular Mari Smith's Social Scoop Facebook group with 20k members. You're welcome to make your own version of the questions!

On a scale of 0-10, how much do you struggle with marketing on Facebook? [0 = not at all, 10 = constant struggle]If you could win a 30-minute consult with Mari, what would you ask?Would you like to receive my *free* Facebook marketing...

https://blog.aweber.com/learn/grow-you

How to Grow Your Email List with Social Media: 10 Experts Share Their Best Tip

https://blog.aweber.com/learn/grow-you

2022 Google Ads & Microsoft Ads Benchmarks for Every Industry (New Data!)

Marketers and business owners are always asking us how they can be sure they’re doing a good job with their advertising, and rightfully so. Because, sure, your conversion rate may have gone up compared to last month, but is it a good conversion rate? Are your competitors seeing better results? Worse?
And this is especially important to know with Google Ads, Bing Ads, and other forms of search advertising. As one of the most effective paid media channels, it’s also one of the most competitive, so it’s important to keep your performance in top shape.

WordStream by LOCALiQ has come to be known for our digital advertising benchmarks reports, and this year, we’ve dug into the data once again to bring you the 2022 Microsoft and Google Ads benchmarks—now in a new, interactive format that will make it even easier for you to see how your business measures up.
The report covers important performance metrics for over 20 different industries, along with key takeaways and tips to improve your performance.
Table of contents

Report overview
All metrics
Average cost per click
Average cost per lead
Average click-through rate
Average conversion rate
Overall costs
Key takeaways
Mobile-friendly view

Report overview
This report contains 2022 search advertising benchmark data to help you better assess, manage, and maximize your campaigns and budgets. A few notes on the report:

This data is pulled from over 18K LOCALiQ client campaigns, advertising over the past year and into Q1 of 2022.
Our proprietary platform dynamically shifts budget between search channels on a campaign-by-campaign basis, but in aggregate, 82% of spend was allotted to Google Ads and 18% to Microsoft.
Metrics include average cost per click, average click-through rate, average cost per lead, and average conversion rate.

“We’re really excited to release our new search advertising benchmarks,” said Mitchell Leiman, Sr. VP and General Manager of Digital Marketing Solutions at LOCALiQ. “This is a complicated time for digital marketers, between the economic volatility and a changing landscape for digital advertising with privacy. That said, done the right way, search advertising remains one of the most effective forms of marketing for our customers. We hope this data helps you evaluate your results!”

2022 search advertising benchmarks, all metrics
In the below table, you...

https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/202

5 Ways to Identify Customer Pain Points So You Can Nail Your Marketing Messages

Knowing your customers can have a big impact on your marketing, and on your business overall. Identifying customer pain points is a key part of this.

People don’t buy a product or service just because it’s cheap or has flashy features. While these reasons might influence someone's purchase decision, they'll ultimately buy something because it solves a problem.

Don’t have time to eat an expensive sit-down meal? Grab food at McDonald’s.

Can't sleep because your neighborhood is noisy? Get a pair of earplugs or a white noise machine.

Tired of driving to the gym every day? Purchase an at-home workout program on DVD.

Once you understand your customers and their problems, you can position your product or service as the solution. And you'll sell a lot more stuff.

What are customer pain points?

Customer pain points are common problems your target customers have that your product or service solves.

We outlined a few examples of customers' pain points above, but what matters is what your customers' pain points are. You can be in the same market with other competing products, but if your product solves your target audiences' pain points in a different way than your competitors, you may want to be targeting a slightly different audience.

For example:

You sell boots. You sell ultralight hiking boots for long-distance hikers who want great ankle support with minimal weight, even if that means they have to pay more than they would on regular boots. Their pain point is finding lightweight, supportive boots.

Your competitor also makes boots, but they make duck boots. They sell duck boots to people who want a pair of boots that will last. Their ideal customers are people who value durability. Their pain point is finding boots that won’t fall apart.

Your other competitor also sells boots, but they sell fashion boots. Their customers must have a boot that looks great and is in line with the current style. Their pain point is not being able to find a good-looking boot.

See where we're going with this? Different pain points, different products.

Ironically, one person could be the ideal customer for all these boot sellers, because each one of us can have multiple pain points, depending on which situations we find ourselves in.

By understanding customer pain points, you can promote your product or service more effectively and...

https://blog.aweber.com/learn/customer

Going back to the office? Here’s why we’re not.

We’re AWeber - a mighty team of 89 remote-first team members that span three time zones, two countries, and 15 states; all working together to help small businesses and entrepreneurs grow by forming meaningful connections with their audiences.

At this point, I’m sure we all know someone who’s returned to the office.

Returned to waking up earlier, fighting traffic during daily commutes, wearing pants...

And why?

What productivity was lost working remotely?

Of course, there are SOME benefits to meeting in person (we plan on doing company-wide retreats after all!), but for us the benefits of staying remote-first far outweighed being in person. Here’s why we’re not returning to the office.

We’re more effective remote-first.

We’re now more diligent about creating discoverable documentation that anyone, in any time zone, at any point in our company’s history can access. A focus on documentation and asynchronous communication allows us to easily discover outcomes from previous projects and make educated business decisions based on those learnings.

We no longer default to in-person meetings, but instead focus on creating transparent documentation that allows for feedback and collaboration from anyone across the company. This enables us to prune back many of those unnecessary meetings that used to fill up our calendars. Or if we do have to meet, we’re now more efficient and effective with how we spend our time together.

Hybrid doesn’t work.

A lot of companies are moving to a hybrid model - it’s the best of both worlds right? Wrong!

Hybrid models add more confusion to daily workflows. Instead of everyone working the same way, you now have to deal with ineffective meetings (think: 10 people crammed into a conference room with poor audio quality and bad camera angles) and relationships built based on proximity, all that puts remote team members at a disadvantage.

Instead, we’re in favor of all working the same way. We all have our own video/audio setups that allow for optimal (and clear!) conversations. We all communicate the same way - with a bias for being asynchronous and heavily documented. We all have the opportunity to form relationships the same way - no one is missing out due to their work location.

Better work / life balance.

We now have more flexibility in our daily lives.

We gain...

https://blog.aweber.com/culture/not-go

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