I’ve built WordPress websites for I don’t know how long now, but suffice to say I’ve relied on it for a bulk of the work I do as a freelance front-ender. And in that time, I’ve used Jetpack on a good number of them for things like site backups, real-time monitoring, and security scans, among other awesome things.
I love Jetpack, but darn it if it’s time-consuming to manage those services (plus the licenses!) in multiple accounts that I have to keep track of (and get invoices for!).
The Jetpack team took a major step to make it easier to manage its services with a new licensing plan that’s designed specifically for agencies and individuals like myself who manage a portfolio of clients. Instead of littering my 1Password account with a bunch of different logins for different sites to do something like backing up a site, I can now do it all from the convenience of one account: my own.
Sure sure, you say. Plenty of plugins offer developer licenses that can be used on multiple sites. But how many of them allow you to manage those sites all at once? Not many as far as I know. But Jetpack now has this great big, handy dashboard that gives you a nice overview of all the sites you manage in one place.
Ah, now I can see all the services, how many licenses are assigned to them, and—this is the kicker—one price to pay for the month.
OK, so the new Jetpack agency dashboard does administrative stuff for licensing and payments. But there’s also the ability to manage all of your Jetpack-driven sites from here as well. Tab over to the site manager and you get to work on all those sites at once. Imagine you have to run a site backup each month for 20 sites. Ugh. It’s really one task, but it’s also sort of like doing the same task 20 times. This way, that can all be done together directly from the dashboard—no hopping accounts and repeating the same task over and again.
Jetpack’s agency licensing is a program you sign up for. Once you’re a member, you not only get the dashboard and a single automated bill each month, but a slew of other perks, including a 25% discount on all Jetpack products and early access to new site management features. This is just the first iteration of the dashboard and site manager, and there’s plenty in the pipeline for more goodness to come. Heck, you can even request a feature if you’d like.
There’s just one requirement: you’ve gotta issue at least five licenses within 90 days. That’s fair considering this is an agency sort of thing and agencies are bound to reach that threshold pretty quickly.
This is definitely the sort of thing that excites me because it saves a lot of time on overhead so more time can be spent, you know, working. So, give it a look and see how it can streamline the way you manage Jetpack on multiple sites.
Whether you’re new to Facebook ads or doing it for some time but still searching for the best way to structure campaigns, this post is for you.
Trying to create an effective campaign can be a pressure at times.
But in this post, we’ll help you simplify your campaigns so running ads won’t seem too daunting to think about.
We’ll help you structure:
Conversion Campaigns
Retargeting Campaigns
Video Views Campaigns
Website Traffic Campaigns
Scaling Campaigns
We’ll also include best practices, tips on choosing the right bid strategy, and a guide to creating compelling copy for the ads.
If you’re ready to streamline your ad creation using simplified campaigns, then let’s get started.
Conversion Campaigns
There is no black and white formula in creating high-converting Facebook ads. To get the best results, you have to do rigorous testing to determine who is best to target and what ads work best.
Once you get this figured out, you can use the insights for scaling campaigns. But more on that later. For now, let’s focus on conversion campaigns.
What are conversion campaigns by the way?
Conversion campaigns are used to drive traffic to lead magnets like checklists, cheat sheets, abandoned cart email templates, onboarding email templates, and webinars.
Any free opt-in you can use to encourage users to interact with your ad is a conversion campaign. These can be free trials for tools like a PDF editor.
When creating a conversion campaign we won’t use CBO or conversion budget optimization yet because a CBO will not spend equally for each ad. We want equal spending for each ad set to get an accurate insight into what audiences work best.
Inside a conversion campaign, you’ll put in an ad set, and inside an ad set, an ad.
To make things clearer about 3 these levels, here’s a quick explanation:
The campaign is the goal you have for ad
The ad set is the audience you’ll be targeting for the ad
Ad is the creative itself
So in a conversion campaign, the sweet spot is putting 4-8 ad sets in it.
The goal is to separate different audiences so you can test out which one group offers the best conversions.
The ad sets can be a lookalike audience based on previous customers or leads, an interest-based group or two, and a broad interest group.
Source: Youtube Channel Andrew Hubbard
As mentioned earlier, we want equal spending across all ad sets in a conversion campaign. So let’s say you have 4 ad sets and a budget of $100 daily, split it equally so each ad set gets $25.
Now for each ad set you want to create 3-4 ads at most.
If you put in more than 4 ads, some of them won’t get any spending because Facebook will only pick at 3-4 for ads to allocate the budget into. This leaves the rest of the ads in a specific ad set untested.
You don’t want this to happen because at this stage you are still testing and you want every ad to get tested to see what converts best. Thus, you won’t know the accurate performance of each ad if you put in too much in one ad set.
If you think of it, doing this will make you lose the opportunity to make more sales since you won’t be able to know the potential of some ads.
But what if you have more than 4 ads to test?
That’s not a problem. You can simply duplicate the ad set and put 3-4 more ads to test in there.
Source: Youtube Channel Andrew Hubbard
Now, this is your first conversion campaign. You are targeting cold audiences or groups who haven’t seen or interacted with your brand yet.
You also want to create a 2nd conversion campaign. This time you put a warm audience in it.
Unlike the cold audience conversion campaign, with the warm audience conversion campaign, you only make one ad set.
In this ad set, you put in the website visitors, users who engaged on your social channels, those who subscribed to your email list, and those who watched your videos recently.
Source: Youtube Channel Andrew Hubbard
Why would you want to split the cold and warm audience?
You’d want to split it so it’s easier to track them in the dashboard. You can take a glance and you’ll know which insight group you’re looking at.
Plus, there’s a slight difference in the ads or creative you will be using for the warm audience since they already have an initial interaction with the brand.
So to recap, you’ll make 2 conversion campaigns.
For the cold audience conversion campaign, you’ll make 4 ad sets with 3-4 ads or creatives each.
For the warm audience conversion campaign, you’ll only make 1 ad set comprising all those who have an initial interaction with your brand. In it, you still put 3-4 ads.
Retargeting Campaign
Retargeting campaigns are basically used for those who are already engaged with the brand but are not hot enough to convert yet.
These audiences are those considering the brand but still looking for other options so you have to convince them that you’re the best choice to make.
The audience for a retargeting campaign tends to be very small and specific. For this, we will use the reach objective since the audience is close to the bottom of the funnel.
We will be using one ad set for each retargeting group.
Let’s say you created a campaign for learning about creating Lightroom presets for portrait photography. You can create a retargeting campaign for those who watched your webinar.
You can target them with a testimonial ad, a close-out ad about an expiring offer, or a cart close-out.
In each ad set, you can put up to 10 ads.
Why?
Because a retargeting campaign that uses the reach objective doesn’t have a problem with spend allocation like what you’d experience in a conversion campaign.
Facebook can allocate fairly across all the ads in a reach objective retargeting campaign.
So to recap, you create one ad set for a retargeting campaign. Then use 1 ad set each for each retargeting group. Then you can put as many as 10 ads per ad set.
Video Views Campaign
If you’re going to run a top-of-the-funnel ad with video views as the main objective, the goal will be for the viewers to consume the whole video so they’ll start warming up and get deeper in the funnel.
For example, for an eCommerce service like a predictive dialer, you could create a video explaining how the tool is used and what benefits it can bring.
The structure of a video views campaign is practically similar to a cold audience conversion campaign.
Create 4-8 ad sets and in each one put 3-4 ads to ensure the best delivery across all ads.
In other cases, you want the audience to consume other types of content on the website like a blog post or a report.
You’ll still use the same structure for a cold audience conversion campaign.
Now that we’ve covered campaigns used for testing and after some time you’ll uncover the best audiences, the best creatives, and the best copy. It’s time for a scaling campaign.
Scaling Campaign
After running testing and figuring out the best audiences and creatives, you can now start with a scaling campaign.
Now with the scaling campaign, you can use campaign budget optimization. At this point, you can allow Facebook to decide where and how much to allocate your budget.
Facebook will look for the best opportunities for you and it’ll focus on spending the budget there.
Create 4 ad sets which mean 4 of the best audiences you have tested. But still, for each ad set, limit yourself to 3-4 ads so you can maximize the conversions each ad gets per day.
4 ad sets with 4 ads each will let Facebook’s algorithm optimize properly so you can make the best out of your ads budget.
Your CBO budget should be equal to the total daily budget you set for the entire campaign.
Every day or two you can increase the spend by 20% until you see the conversion rate slowing down. When you reach this point you can stop with whatever budget amount you’re in.
After some time, the conversions will decline. It’s best that while you’re running scaling campaigns, you still continue to test new ads which you’ll use to replace the old ads you use in the scaling campaign.
This will help you get consistent conversions and prevent ad fatigue.
So to summarize the whole campaign process:
You start by testing audiences, creatives, and copy using conversion campaigns, retargeting campaigns, or video views campaigns.
Determine the winning audiences and creatives and use it for the scaling campaign with CBO turned on.
Simplified Facebook Ads Campaign Best Practices
For the best practices, we’ll cover 3 areas:
Audience size
Placement
Events
Large Audience Size
In the testing phase, increase your target audience size so facebook can gather enough data fast.
For this you can:
Use large groups for a lookalike audience
Group interests and behaviors with a lot of overlap
Increase retargeting windows
For large audiences, an audience overlap will likely happen. To minimize this, you can use exclusions like excluding past purchasers.
Utilize Automatic Placements
Increase the ad budget to bid ratios
Use campaign budget optimization when scaling
Test creatives at the ad level are much more efficient. No need to create multiple ad sets for each creative
Use Placement Asset Customization to coordinate messaging across platforms
Bid based on the audience’s lifetime value
Optimize Ad For The Right Event
Before turning off your campaigns if you’re not happy with the performance, optimize it for an event deeper in the funnel. This extra wait will be worth the upfront cost.
For instance, if you had been optimizing for clicks, optimize for an event that’s unique when initiating a checkout like an add to cart.
Keeping these 3 in mind will be great growth hacking techniques in the Facebook ads field.
Choosing The Right Bid Strategy
To simplify bidding, here are 3 strategies you can work around with.
Lowest Cost: This is where you let Facebook set the bid for the conversion event you’re optimizing for
Target Cost: If you want a specific cost per result, you can set an average cost for each conversion event
Lowest Cost With A Bid Cap: If you’re targeting a broad audience with lower chances of converting set a bid cap to manage costs
Guide In Creating A Compelling Ad Copy
Optimize and improve your ads if you’re not happy with your ad’s current performance.
A compelling ad copy will reduce the cost per lead, improve click-through rates, and of course, the overall performance.
So here are 5 elements for a compelling ad copy.
1. Start By Grabbing Attention
The best way to grab attention is to ask a powerful question where the audience will generally answer yes to.
You can use an emotion-stirring question that triggers them to make an internal answer of “yes, that’s me!”.
Doing this will also make your audience feel that you’re speaking to them directly.
How can you do this?
Here are some examples you can get ideas from:
If your audience is people in the manufacturing industry or eCommerce store owners doing the inventory themselves, you can present them with your automated inventory tool by asking: “Did you know you can stop counting your inventory?”.
Or if you’re targeting website owners to promote your user research platform, you can ask: “Is investing in user experience a waste of money?”
The main goal is to state a question that will trigger an emotional response and resonate with your audience.
One thing to keep in mind is to write like you’re part of the target audience. Use the words and phrases they use when telling them about the problem you’re going to solve for them. This will resonate with them better.
If you have no idea how they talk. You can try to jump in on a call with them or ask them to write a survey. This will give you a good idea of how you can speak like them.
To grab attention, you can also start with a polarizing or controversial statement.
For example, if you’re going to market colorful sarape blankets, a polarizing statement will be: “blankets should always be black and white”.
With a statement like this, people will either agree or disagree.
If they agree, you’ll get them emotionally motivated to continue watching your ad.
If they disagree, they’d still want to watch to prove that their opposing view is correct and that you are wrong.
Now that you’ve grabbed their interest, it’s time to build their interest.
Here’s another example from a polarizing copy from Caitlin Bacher:
2. Keep Them Interested
Build up your viewer’s interest by telling them what they can get if they finish the ad. It can be a promise of new information they’ll be learning.
If you use the question: “did you know you can stop counting your inventory”, you can follow that up by adding: “if you have a barcode system to upgrade your inventory system”.
3. Build Authority And Trust
Before deepening their desire, you first have to build authority and trust so, in their eyes, you’re a credible brand they can listen to and believe in.
This will most likely be the first time they see or hear about your brand. At this point, you’re a stranger that showed up in their Facebook stories or news free.
Always remember the question in people’s minds – why should I listen to you?
Give them a good reason and they’ll continue giving you the attention.
4. Desire
Now that they can trust you, you can now go into detail about your offer, say a migration from one tool to another like a HubSpot migration. In a few sentences, tell them about what your offer can do for them.
Paint a picture of how their business will be like or how their life will turn out if they watch your video, attend your webinar like what Meetfox offers, read your blog, or buy your product.
Always tell them what benefits them. Use “you” and not “we” or “us”. Make everything about them and you’ll drive them to the action you’ll want them to take.
5. Call To Action
Make it easy for them to know what to do next. You can get them interested but not drive them to where you want them to be if you don’t have a call to action.
It doesn’t have to be fancy, just tell them exactly what you want them to do like: “click here to read the blog” or “click here to check out your options”.
Prevent them from guessing the next action, tell them straight what they have to do.
The content that you post on your social media accounts is a truly powerful asset, having the ability to drastically transform your brand’s popularity.
You can only reach such an ability to improve your social media presence through a well-planned social media content strategy that will allow you to create high-value posts which perfectly align with your goals.
Not all strategies are created equal. It is very important to understand how you should be molding your strategy, taking into consideration the industry you activate in and your target audience. However, what is similar in every strategy are the steps you should follow to create a long-lasting plan that will bring you success with the expansion of your business.
Step 1: Determine Your Strengths and Weaknesses
It is vital to take a good look at your social media situation before putting together any strategy. You should know what to add to your plan, what to keep, and what to discard.
A good way to start your analysis on weak and strong points is to research what social media channels are the best for your brand and to be more active on those while discarding the channels that are not useful for you and your consumer, as they may only distract you from what is truly powerful.
Another significant element is the content that you post and the source of it. You have to know if you have the necessary resources for the type of content creation that you may choose, and you also know which is the best channel to spread your content.
You can have two types of goals: marketing and social goals. While marketing goals are targeted toward what you can do through your social media accounts to advertise and inform the public about your brand, social goals are only targeted towards the growth of your social media channels. It is essential to know what both these objectives are and to make sure you don’t neglect one over another, as they complete each other’s purpose.
You should first establish your marketing goals, as they will let you know how to approach your social goals, and how to balance the allocated time for analyzing your social media channels, versus creating content for those channels.
Step 3: Know the Competition
Social media has made it very easy to find and analyze the competition. You can see their exact marketing strategies and the number of followers, as well as follower responses, on their public accounts. This is where you should start, as it exposes a big part of their successes, as well as some failures, which you can learn from.
Not everything you want to know about your competition can be found on social media, though. Your best guess here would be to do outside research, to find the best ways you can get a higher reach for your audience. A great example is keyword research, as it can help you optimize your reach, but also find other potential competitors.
Finally, you must gain knowledge from your competitors, know their mistakes, so you can avoid them yourself, know what to imitate and what to do differently from their strategy, things that will certainly bring you a lot of success in overcoming your competition.
When you have created a good analysis of your objectives and competition, it is time to focus on the most important part, which is your audience analysis. A good social media content strategy can not exist without good knowledge of what the right audience is, so conducting research on your audience and getting to know them very well is necessary.
The best way to find the right audience is to develop a simple persona, which will lead you into making the right decision about who you are targeting. Using the analytical tools of each social media channel is the best tool you have at hand to help you create the persona you are looking for.
Step 5: Establish Your Tone of Voice
Once you have created your persona, you have to find the best way to address it. Having a steady brand voice is necessary for delivering your speech the right way, and making your brand stand out through a specific and unique aura.
To establish that perfect tone, you first have to observe your audience’s discussions and match your approach with the contexts that are engaging for them. You will also have to summarize your brand by using the right words, and to keep an eye on the competition’s tone, choosing if you should learn from them, or avoid their mistakes.
Finally, a step that should not be overlooked is to observe the way highly acclaimed brands project their tone and apply their techniques to your brand, especially if you share a similar target audience with them.
Step 6: Create High-Quality Content
Your message can only be delivered through your content, so make sure that you offer value through your posts, but also make them attractive. This can be done by making sure you know how to add certain touches to your posts, which will make everything perfect. Those changes can be:
The ideal copy length for each social media channel
The ideal resolution of your image posts
Specific image types that you should create
Video content that is right for each social media channel
You don’t need to know any special techniques or rules about how to do everything perfectly. It is enough that you keep researching how to make each channel work for you at maximum capacity. You can simply do that by observing other successful brands, and how they create and administer their social media posts.
Always be aware of how your actions impact your success. A very important part of your strategy is making sure that you know the effect that your posts have on your audience. Knowing the effects that your posts have on your audience is a very powerful asset, so make sure you are always on the look.
Just like establishing your persona, analytical tools are the best item at hand for measuring your results, so make sure you use them because they will save you a lot of effort.
Conclusion
Although creating the perfect content strategy is a very meticulous process, it doesn’t have to be difficult and extremely demanding. With the right social media tools, knowledge, and ideas, you will be able to create a perfect strategy that will bring you closer to your goals.
With this being said, never forget to keep a positive mindset. Everything has its ups and downs, so if you encounter any difficulties, make sure you are following the right steps and keep your work steady.
Perhaps the most basic and obvious use of CSS custom properties is design tokens. Colors, fonts, spacings, timings, and other atomic bits of design that you can pull from as you design a site. If you pretty much only pull values from design tokens, you’ll be headed toward clean design and that consistent professional look that is typically the goal in web design. In fact, I’ve written that I think it’s exactly this that contributes to the popularity of utility class frameworks:
I’d argue some of that popularity is driven by the fact that if you choose from these pre-configured classes, that the design ends up fairly nice. You can’t go off the rails. You’re choosing from a limited selection of values that have been designed to look good.
I’m saying this (with a stylesheet that defines these classes as one-styling-job tokens):
<h1 class="color-primary size-large">Header<h1>
…is a similar value proposition as this:
html {
--color-primary: green;
--size-large: 3rem;
/* ... and a whole set of tokens */
}
h1 {
color: var(--color-primary);
font-size: var(--size-large);
}
There are zero-build versions of both. For example, Tachyons is an it-is-what-it is stylesheet with a slew of utility classes you just use, while Windi is a whole fancy thing with a just-in-time compiler and such. Pollen is an it-is-what-it is library of custom properties you just use, while the brand new Open Props has a just-in-time compiler to only deliver the custom properties that are used.
The entire thing is literally just a whole pile of CSS custom properties you can use to design stuff. It’s like a massive starting point for your styles. It’s saying custom property all the things, but in the way that we’re already used to with design tokens where they are a limited pre-determined number of choices.
The analogies are clear to people:
Open Props: A new CSS library by the amazing @argyleink.
What it doesn’t do is prevent you from having to name things, which is something I know utility-class lovers really enjoy. Here, you’ll need to continue to use regular ol’ CSS selectors (like with named classes) to select things and style them as you “normally” would. But rather than hand-crafting your own values, you’re plucking values from these custom properties.
The whole base thing (you can view the source here) rolls in at 4.4kb across the wire (that’s what my DevTools showed, anyway). That doesn’t include the CSS you write to use the custom properties, but it’s a pretty tiny amount of overhead. There are additional PropPacks that increase the size (but thye are also super tiny), and if you’re worried about size, that’s what the whole just-in-time thing is about. You can play with that on StackBlitz.
Seems pretty sweet to me! I’d use it. I like that it’s ultimately just regular CSS, so there is nothing you can’t do. You’ll stay in good shape as CSS evolves.
I was just going on about how many awesome little helper sites there are out there, and now I’ve ran across another wonderful little hive of them. Sébastien Noël, under the name fffuel, has created a whole bunch of great ones like:
As I write this, world leaders are gathering in Glasgow for COP26, the international climate change conference, in the attempt to halt (or at least slow down) catastrophic climate change by pledging to end their countries’ dependence on fossil fuels. Only time will tell whether they will succeed (spoiler: it’s not looking good), but one thing that’s increasingly clear is that we in the tech industry can no longer bury our heads in the sand. We all have a responsibility to ensure our planet is habitable for future generations.
It’s all too easy to disassociate climate change from the web. After all, most of us are sitting at our desks day in, day out. We don’t physically see the emissions the web is producing. But according to a report by the BBC in 2020, the internet accounts for 3.7% of carbon emissions worldwide — and rising. That puts our industry on level with the entire air travel industry. So, when I think of what we can do to make our websites “better” I immediately think of how we can make them better for the planet. Because, like it or not, the carbon emissions produced by our websites not only impact our own users, but all the people who don’t use our websites too. We certainly have a lot of work to do.
It’s no secret that web pages have been becoming increasingly bloated. The average web page size now stands at around 2MB. This is terrible news for users, whose experience of browsing such bloated sites will be very poor on slow connections, but it’s also terrible for the planet. Poor performance and energy intensity often go hand in hand. But happily, it means that fixing one will go a long way towards fixing the other — it’s a win-win. So what’s one thing we can do to improve the environmental impact of our websites (and, by extension, improve performance for our users too)?
My suggestion is that we need to set our websites a carbon budget.
Performance budgets in web development are not a new idea, and in many respects go hand-in-hand with carbon budgets. Optimizing for performance should generally have a positive impact on your website’s energy efficiency. But a quantifiable carbon budget as well helps us look at every aspect of our website through the lens of sustainability, and may help us consider aspects that a performance budget alone wouldn’t cover.
How can we begin to calculate a carbon budget for our site? Calculating the amount of carbon produced by a web page is difficult due to the many factors to consider: there’s the power used during development, the data centers that host our files, the data transfer itself, the power consumed by the devices of our end users, and more. It would be virtually impossible to perform our own calculations every time we build a website. But Wholegrain Digital’s Website Carbon Calculator tool, which estimates the carbon footprint of a given website, gives us a good jumping-off point from which to start thinking about this stuff.
Let’s take the COP26 website as an example. Running this site through the Carbon Calculator reveals some fairly shocking results: The site is dirtier (i.e. more carbon intensive) than 94% of web pages tested by the tool. Inspecting the homepage in DevTools, we can see that entire page weighs in at around 6.4MB of transferred data — way about average, but sadly not unusual. Further inspection reveals that JavaScript from social media embeds (including YouTube video embeds) are among the worst offenders on the homepage, contributing significantly to the page weight. Fershad Irani has written this detailed analysis of the areas where the site falls short, and what can be done about it. (Up until a few days ago, the total size was 8.8MB, including a 3MB PNG image. Thanks to the Fershad’s work in highlighting this to the COP26 team, the image has now been replaced with a much smaller version.)
By understanding which elements of our design have the greatest impact on performance, we can gain an understanding of where some of our biggest carbon savings could lie, and begin to make trade-offs. The carbon budget might need to be different for every site — sites that require a lot of motion and interactive content, for instance, may inevitably use more resources. But perhaps for a simple web page like this we could aim for under 1g of carbon per page view? When we think about how many page views a site like COP26 would accumulate over the period of the conference, this could amount to significant savings.
Once we can identify where possible carbon savings lie, we can do something about them. Wholegrain Digital’s article “17 Ways to Make your Website More Energy Efficient” is a good place to start. I also recommend reading Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood for a practical guide to holistically reducing the environmental impact of the sites we build. The website Sustainable Web Design has some excellent development resources.
As for convincing clients to buy into the idea of a carbon budget, using Core Web Vitals to kick off that conversation is a good place to start. Using tools like Lighthouse, we can see which aspects of our site have the most impact on performance and how Core Web Vitals are affected. Seeing the impact of that code on your clients’ site performance score (which can affect Google’s search ranking) might just be enough to convince them.
It would be great to see Google (and other industry-leading companies) lead the way on this and build carbon calculations into tools like Lighthouse. By putting that information front and center they could play an important role in empowering developers to make more environmentally-conscious decisions — and show that they’re putting their money where their mouth is. (There’s actually an open GitHub issue for this.) Perhaps we also need some kind of industry-wide certification, as explored in this article by Mike Gifford.
There’s much more we can do to improve the carbon footprint of our sites. It’s time for the web industry to heed this wake-up call. In the words of Greta Thunberg:
Are you tired of using the same old Google fonts from website to website? You’re in luck!
In this month’s roundup of the best new fonts, we’re showcasing the latest and greatest fonts from independent type foundries and designers worldwide.
Astronef Super
Astronef Super is a retro-futuristic font collection with seven styles that are meant to be mixed and matched. While the font is modular in design, there are wild variations in weight that you can have a lot of fun with.
Auguste
Auguste Serif and Auguste Sans Serif were originally drawn as a single stencil font that combined serif and sans serif styles. They ultimately became two separate fonts, with four weights apiece, that can be scaled up and down in size based on your needs.
Bartok
Bartok is an exciting font as it breaks with the concept of creating a family of unified styles. Instead, each of the four styles uses different structures and weights, meaning this font can be repurposed for a wide variety of brands and styles.
Cardone
Cardone is a type of serif known as Scotch Roman, designed for functionality and legibility. With its sturdy and brutal design, this serif is perfect for editorial content.
Champ
Champ is a fun and friendly font with nine weights. Because of its bold footprint, this serif performs best in branding and headlines.
Columba
Columba is modeled after old-style printing press typefaces. With its narrow, legible serif forms, Columba is most useful in text-heavy environments — both on the web as well as for printed brand materials.
Deia
Deia is a bracketed serif font with seven fonts. Thanks to the curved stroke transitions in Deia’s character set, this font is full of personality and would work great in product packaging and website branding.
Garton
Garton is a 19th century-inspired typewriter typeface that would look great on literary and editorial websites. This uniquely elegant font has three weights with italic companion sets for each.
Halisa
Halisa is an extensive font family with 60 styles, five widths, and six weights (plus italics). The designer drew inspiration from 19th-century factory signs to come up with this legible semi-constructed grotesque typeface.
Helvetica Now Variable
Helvetica Now Variable is an upgrade on Helvetica Now and the original 1957 Helvetica design. This one, however, adds over a million new Helvetica styles to the fold (all in one font file), which designers can use to create all kinds of digital and print content, including typographic animations.
Palast
Palast is a type system that consists of three sub-families: Palast Text, Palast Display, and Palast Poster. Designers can use this carefully crafted serif font family pretty much anywhere they want — from clients’ websites to promotional print graphics.
Parco
Parco is part of the new wave of humanistic typographic design. With Parco’s compact spacing and tall characters, this font will help designers craft eye-catching and highly legible headlines and branding.
Right Gothic
Right Gothic is a huge font family, containing 98 styles — seven weights, seven widths, 20-degree italics, and an adjustable contrast axis. While this contemporary font is a sans serif, it draws upon typical serif anatomy with its high contrast between thick and thin strokes.
Rund Text
Rund Text is a geometric sans serif that looks both stylish yet comfortable. It also has a companion Display family available to designers who want to bring the same type of functional design to larger headlines or branding.
Sculpin
Sculpin is another variable font to make this list of the best new fonts. This sans serif font was designed as if a chisel and brush had been used, giving it a structured, hand-crafted feel.
The content that you post on your social media accounts is a truly powerful asset, having the ability to drastically transform your brand’s popularity.
You can only reach such an ability to improve your social media presence through a well-planned social media content strategy that will allow you to create high-value posts which perfectly align with your goals.
Not all strategies are created equal. It is very important to understand how you should be molding your strategy, taking into consideration the industry you activate in and your target audience. However, what is similar in every strategy are the steps you should follow to create a long-lasting plan that will bring you success with the expansion of your business.
Step 1: Determine Your Strengths and Weaknesses
It is vital to take a good look at your social media situation before putting together any strategy. You should know what to add to your plan, what to keep, and what to discard.
A good way to start your analysis on weak and strong points is to research what social media channels are the best for your brand and to be more active on those while discarding the channels that are not useful for you and your consumer, as they may only distract you from what is truly powerful.
Another significant element is the content that you post and the source of it. You have to know if you have the necessary resources for the type of content creation that you may choose, and you also know which is the best channel to spread your content.
You can have two types of goals: marketing and social goals. While marketing goals are targeted toward what you can do through your social media accounts to advertise and inform the public about your brand, social goals are only targeted towards the growth of your social media channels. It is essential to know what both these objectives are and to make sure you don’t neglect one over another, as they complete each other’s purpose.
You should first establish your marketing goals, as they will let you know how to approach your social goals, and how to balance the allocated time for analyzing your social media channels, versus creating content for those channels.
Step 3: Know the Competition
Social media has made it very easy to find and analyze the competition. You can see their exact marketing strategies and the number of followers, as well as follower responses, on their public accounts. This is where you should start, as it exposes a big part of their successes, as well as some failures, which you can learn from.
Not everything you want to know about your competition can be found on social media, though. Your best guess here would be to do outside research, to find the best ways you can get a higher reach for your audience. A great example is keyword research, as it can help you optimize your reach, but also find other potential competitors.
Finally, you must gain knowledge from your competitors, know their mistakes, so you can avoid them yourself, know what to imitate and what to do differently from their strategy, things that will certainly bring you a lot of success in overcoming your competition.
When you have created a good analysis of your objectives and competition, it is time to focus on the most important part, which is your audience analysis. A good social media content strategy can not exist without good knowledge of what the right audience is, so conducting research on your audience and getting to know them very well is necessary.
The best way to find the right audience is to develop a simple persona, which will lead you into making the right decision about who you are targeting. Using the analytical tools of each social media channel is the best tool you have at hand to help you create the persona you are looking for.
Once you have created your persona, you have to find the best way to address it. Having a steady brand voice is necessary for delivering your speech the right way, and making your brand stand out through a specific and unique aura.
To establish that perfect tone, you first have to observe your audience’s discussions and match your approach with the contexts that are engaging for them. You will also have to summarize your brand by using the right words, and to keep an eye on the competition’s tone, choosing if you should learn from them, or avoid their mistakes.
Finally, a step that should not be overlooked is to observe the way highly acclaimed brands project their tone and apply their techniques to your brand, especially if you share a similar target audience with them.
Step 6: Create High-Quality Content
Your message can only be delivered through your content, so make sure that you offer value through your posts, but also make them attractive. This can be done by making sure you know how to add certain touches to your posts, which will make everything perfect. Those changes can be:
The ideal copy length for each social media channel
The ideal resolution of your image posts
Specific image types that you should create
Video content that is right for each social media channel
You don’t need to know any special techniques or rules about how to do everything perfectly. It is enough that you keep researching how to make each channel work for you at maximum capacity. You can simply do that by observing other successful brands, and how they create and administer their social media posts.
Step 7: Keep Track of Your Results
Always be aware of how your actions impact your success. A very important part of your strategy is making sure that you know the effect that your posts have on your audience. Knowing the effects that your posts have on your audience is a very powerful asset, so make sure you are always on the look.
Just like establishing your persona, analytical tools are the best item at hand for measuring your results, so make sure you use them because they will save you a lot of effort.
Conclusion
Although creating the perfect content strategy is a very meticulous process, it doesn’t have to be difficult and extremely demanding. With the right social media tools, knowledge, and ideas, you will be able to create a perfect strategy that will bring you closer to your goals.
With this being said, never forget to keep a positive mindset. Everything has its ups and downs, so if you encounter any difficulties, make sure you are following the right steps and keep your work steady.
Every day design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site.
The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s a handy compilation of the top curated stories from the last seven days. Enjoy!
I recently noticed that animations in Safari were stuttering pretty badly on my M1 powered 2020 MacBook Air, and dove in to figure out why.
The why:
This wasn’t a bug. This was a feature.
By default, macOS Monterey enables “Low power mode” on Battery power and disables it when using a Power Adapter. Safari, it seems, is programmed to interpret this setting to mean that it should reduce the number of times it paints to the screen to prolong battery life.
On my MacBook Air, that means from 60fps to 30fps.
