You’re planning a webinar or online workshop and you’re looking for the best webinar graphics for marketing the event. You want to promote via email, your website, social media, maybe even paid ads — but before you spend all that time, money, and effort you want to design a compelling webinar graphic to include in promotion.
In this article we’ll show you the 29 best webinar graphics for marketing your event on any screen. Use these graphics as inspiration for your own designs or have a designer create something unique and specific to your brand based upon the ones you like best.
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Customize our proven templates with your details and hit the ground running. Includes webinar graphic templates, starter email copy, and sample paid ads copy.
For the first several graphics you’ll find a bit of commentary setting up what we like about each graphic. You can use that feedback to come to your own opinions regarding the remainder of the designs.
There is nothing new under the sun so don’t put pressure on yourself to come up with something that is completely unique and different. At the end of the day, you want solid webinar ads and promotional graphics that communicate who you are, what you do in a way that resonates with the person you are geared to help most.
So let’s get started!
Updated Webinar Graphics
That’s right! We’ve updated this post to be more reflective of the current design trends. What does that mean for you?
First it means that you have new examples to inspired and educate whatever design you create.
Second it means that we’ll lead with looks that are current. This doesn’t mean that the original webinar graphics are irrelevant or useless. It simply means that you’ll notice older trends in the original list as well as timeless design concepts that are worthwhile no mater what year we’re in.
Bottom line… look at all of the examples as inspirational to help you arrive at your perfect design!
Descript — Create with Descript
Descript typically uses blue brand colors and for this live event they have branched out to use a secondary color in their palette. This design captures all of the essential information:
Title
Date & time
Brand
Multiple hosts with names and titles
Something particularly creative is the “with Descript” in the title. This works on two levels. First, it’s their company name… so “with our company”. Second, Descript is the name of the product so, “…with our product.” Pretty creative!
Very simple and should be easy to create your own design that captures the same element.
ConvertKit has a very simple design that can easily be reproduced, save one element.
You could easily recreate this design by placing all the elements in the same locations as the graphic, replacing their details with yours.
For the host images, instead of using the masked ‘blob’ images, you could simply use circles or squares.
The one element unique to ConvertKit which may be more difficult to replace is the background, complete with shapes of multiple colors. It may be worth asking your brand designer to create various backgrounds that you could easily use throughout any designs you create.
But super simple design that has all the essential elements.
The Bettermode design is very clean, simple, and straighforward — in this particular image, the brand is the same plus a nice geometric shape which serves as the host graphic.
You could very easily delete the shape style and just use the pill type design for the photo. Very easy to duplicate.
This is a fun spinoff design from the standardized Proposify Branding. The blue and yellow tones are included in the larger brand color palette but in this design they are the feature colors.
In addition, the webinar graphic does a great job of getting a lot of information on the slide without it feeling crowded.
Show Name
Event Title
Speaker Images
Speaker Names
Design Elements
This is a great example of both a one and two-host event graphic and definitely worth drawing inspiration from.
This is a great graphic from Smokeball, a company that provides legal practice management software for small law firms.
What makes this design really pop is the custom branded background used. It provides a great dynamic feel without stealing too much from the information.
There are three colors used for fonts and two font designs—standard and uppercase.
If you have a well known speaker to your industry, having the photo & name section is a great addition and this graphic does a nice job of balancing the information with the speaker image.
Finally, the ‘Legal Webinars’ badge is a nice touch — especially if it is an element that they use across multiple brand images.
One critique, the branded background looks great — however, the number of patterns may be a bit distracting, so one thing to try differently would be to lower the opacity of the icons or to remove one or two of them.
2) LoginRadius — Customer Identity and Access Management
LoginRadius uses a very standard approach to their graphic — solid background, simple graphic, and light text on dark background.
The graphic utilizes one font with two styles — standard and uppercase. When it comes to the non-font design, this design utilizes an isometric graphic illustration to depict the webinar subject matter.
There are three total colors not including the illustration.
It is a very simple graphic and provides the information in a very straight forward visual.
One critique for this graphic, the spacing is not quite to our liking when it comes to how far the dark blue box pushes over to the illustration. One change to make might be to move “Authentication” to a new line and nudge the blue box to the left so there is more balance.
Frank Kern goes with a very simple graphic — photo, blurred background, and black on yellow text.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this simple approach and Frank Kern is no slouch to follow after.
What makes this work is that it is a quality photo, interesting background (very relevant to his audience), and the title/text is very specific and catches the eye.
One critique for this graphic, there isn’t much branding to the image.
This particular graphic was run as part of a Facebook Ad so there is additional context provided which is something you would want to consider if you use this approach. If this graphic were to be used outside of the Facebook Platform, you may want to include the company logo.
4) Lewis Howes — Mastering the Secret Weapon for Growing Your Business… Hosting Webinars!
Lewis Howes produces a lot of webinars and does a good job of keeping up branding from image to image.
This particular graphic is used in conjunction with a Facebook Ad and foregoes providing any information on the design itself.
The organic color, the font, and the hand drawn arrows are all consistent with Lewis’ branding across many platforms.
Rather than an illustration, Lewis uses an engaging photo of himself — well lit with proper composition.
One critique for this graphic, if you were using this outside of the Facebook environment, you would want to include a logo or a name somewhere on the graphic to provide context. Possibly ditch the arrow and add a URL where the user could register for the webinar.
5) Neil Patel — Converting Prospects Into Paying Customers
Neil Patel is a long-time SEO expert and he produces a lot of free resources (like webinars) for entrepreneurs and online business owners.
His graphic is very simple, very clean, and very Neil.
His traditional color scheme is orange and you can see that in his name above the webinar topic, however, he uses a green color to better catch the eye. This graphic was used in a Facebook Ad combined the imagery with text for greater context.
The grey background includes a tiled look along with the filled-in green chart to provide a nice branded look.
One critique for this graphic, the ‘Sign Up Now’ call to action is a little passive — it could have worked to make that CTA filled or outlined as orange. Either way, this is a great graphic example.
Foxley is a platform that provides business training to graphic designers and illustrators.
There is a lot to catch your attention in this graphic — perhaps what draws the eye most is the headshot. The main title “How I generated 393 new website leads in 6 days,” leads the viewer to believe that it will be the man in the picture presenting — if you don’t know who the person is the image and title are less compelling.
The soft black glow across the bacground image combined with the yellow stripe is a very strong branded look and is definitely eye-catching. The Foxley logo is well-placed at the top of the image and the ‘Claim Your Spot’ button is a strong visual CTA.
One critique for this graphic would be to include the name of the subject whose headshot is featured along with the company they represent. That would bring more synergy to the overall communication of the graphic.
7) E-GMAT — Coaching & Training for Achieving Target GMAT Score
e-GMAT provides training, courses, and coaching to help students hit their target GMAT score.
This graphic ran in conjunction with copy to invite users to the webinar.
Overall, the graphic is very simple — text and image on solid background. This simple approach works well for those who do not want to hire a designer and have limited design skills.
There isn’t much by way of branding, and that is okay if the content or the company are well known to the audience. In this case GMAT is a very specific word that users will immediately know if the ad applies to them or not.
One critique for this image, something other than a straight black background might help to brand the image a bit more to the company, giving more authority and credibility to the ad through the image.
8) PropellerAds — Display and Mobile Advertising Network
PropellerAds is an online platform that connects publishers and advertisers to create an alternative traffic source.
This ad utilizes a custom branded background along with a single font in two different weights. The color scheme is a direct lift off their brand and the logo connects the content with the company itself.
Like the Foxley webinar graphic, this image uses masked photos of two individuals.
One critique for this image would be to add the names of the individuals appearing in the graphic. This appears on the PropellerAds website where the webinar is available to watch and in the third paragraph mentions the names of the two individuals. A small text over of each of them at the bottom of the image would be a nice touch to complete the image and bring more context.
Leadpages is a landing page and lead capture SaaS that provides you with an online platform to capture customer information and connect it to a wide variety of CRM and email marketing platforms.
This ad is very simple, utilizes the Leadpages blue background, includes the Leadpages logo, and a CTA yellow consistent with their entire brand.
There are two fonts used with two colors total for great simplicity. You’ll also see a single image that has been poorly masked.
Though the image is a nice touch, the one critique for this webinar graphic would be to have a better masked image. Masked images are when you remove the background leaving the outline of only the primary subject of the image. Though we don’t know who the person in the image is, we can assume that it is either the presenter or a stock image representing their audience.
Final Thoughts On Webinar Graphics, Promotional Banners, and Ads
Regardless of what design you choose to use, the most important thing is that you actually launch your webinar. Don’t allow yourself to become hung up on the design.
In our search for the 26 best webinar graphics we found LOTS of graphics that were simple with text on photo, just like these few examples below:
While these three examples may not be as attractive as our top choices above, they get the job done. If you have a webinar ready to go and all you’re waiting on are graphics — wait no more. Find a few stock photos that communicate the idea, throw some text on top of the graphic with the title and your business name, export your new webinar ad and start promoting!
If you are in a situation where those above you are demanding quality graphics but your hands are tied in terms of budget, consider finding someone to produce graphics for you through a service like Fiverr or even signing up for a low-end unlimited graphic design service.
Bottom line — the success of your webinar will hinge on the quality of your presentation and the clarity of your offer. Everything else just ads further support to these two pillars.
Questions?
If you have any question about creating your own webinar graphics and promotional ads send us a message or leave a comment below. In some cases we may be able to provide a quick solution, in other cases we may redirect you to another service or resource.
“How do I get a cool custom short URL like I see other brands using on social media?”
Something you don’t pay attention to when you first start sharing your content on social media is the actual length of the URLs you are including. As time goes by, you become more aware of how important presentation (uh hem, branding) is and start taking notice of how ugly your URLs actually are.
They are not pretty. They are too long. What can I do about this?
Once it is on your radar you start noticing that other users are sharing links but they are coming from bit.ly or buff.ly or rebrand.ly. The tools that create these pretty links are called URL shorteners — and they do exactly that, shorten the URL.
And Then You See A Short URL That Is Custom
Among all the generic links that come from these URL shorteners, you will notice that some users have unique URL shorteners that appear as if it were made just for them.
And you’d be right — these are called custom short URLs or a branded short URL.
In this article we will take you through the steps necessary to setup your own custom short URL using a service called Bitly. We’ll use pictures and specific instructions for every step in the process and when we’re done you will have your very own custom URL.
Who Is Using A Custom Short URL
Years ago I spotted my first custom short URL. It was from Michael Hyatt. I actually thought it was so cool I took a screenshot. I immediately wanted one.
Michael Hyatt is the first person / brand I noticed using a custom branded URL.
Hyatt has been a mega-blogger for years initially I thought, “that’s probably something only the ‘big guys’ have access to.”
Shortly thereafter I noticed that Buffer had their own. I took a screenshot of their Tweet, too.
Buffer has their own branded URL, buff.ly.
Seeing two brands using their own branded short URL, I started to scroll through my feed looking for other brands using a custom short URL. Once I started looking, they were everywhere!
After a little bit of research I discovered that anyone, in fact, could have their own branded short URL, including you!
Now, years after first noticing a custom url shortener, they are actually commonplace. There are dozens of companies and apps that offer customer url shorteners for cheap, even free. At this point, it isn’t a requirement to have your own custom branded shortened URL, but it’s so easy, why would you not want to?
Beyond the visual appeal, there is a growing list of features a custom short URL can offer which can enhance your overall marketing efforts — not just your brand appearance. Dustin Stout has a great breakdown on custom short URL benefits along with a very in depth tutorial on maximizing Rebrandly.
Custom branded URL shorteners are commonplace and with cheap and free options, there’s really no reason why you wouldn’t want to use one.
Choosing A Domain Name for Your Custom Short URL
When you’re choosing a domain for your primary website it is always preferred to find a .com or .net address. When choosing a domain for your custom short URL, it really doesn’t matter what domain extension you use. The only preference is to find one that’s short. An extension with 2-3 letters is preferable. So avoid .online or .cafe or .sports because we’re going for as few characters as possible.
Visit a domain registrar (in this example we’re using GoDaddy) and start searching for the domain you want to use.
It doesn’t matter where you buy the domain name you will want to use with your custom branded url shortener.
As you scroll through all the options and recommendations, you are looking for a domain similar to your brand but shorter. For example, Michael Hyatt’s website is michaelhyatt.com and his branded URL is mhyatt.us.
When setting up Campaign Donut’s URL, we went through dozens of options and even more searches. Many of the domains we wanted were already taken. We eventually settled on the domain cmpdnt, a version of our domain name with no vowels.
Find a short URL that you’re comfortable with and buy it.
Suggestion: Identify a short version of your company name or domain name. You can remove the vowels to have a branded name but shorter length.
Once you have purchased your new domain, it is time to integrate the domain with a URL shortening service.
Select A URL Shortening Service
Today, you have more choices than ever when it comes to selecting a service to hand your URL shortening. Here are five URL shortening services that give you the ability to create your own branded URL:
There are two things you want to look at before choosing your service:
Will the plan I choose meet my needs.
Will this service integrate with the tools I already use.
At Campaign Donut, we chose Bitly because of the second need — it was the only option that had a native integration with several key services we use.
Third-party integration tools like Zapier can help you get around the lack of native integration with some tools — others, you’ll want native integration.
URL Shortener Integrations You May Want
Right now you may just be thinking, “This URL is ugly and I want to shorten it.” Over time you’ll find yourself wanting to integrate your URL shortener into other services. When that time comes, you’ll be majorly disappointed to find out that your service isn’t compatible.
Here are some of the integrations you may want to consider.
Zapier
Make.com
Social media scheduling apps
WordPress
Chrome extensions
Slack
Hubspot
Take inventory of how you’re currently using and sharing links and make a note of what links you may want to shorten with a branded domain. Then look for that integration on the different url shortening service integrations pages.
What A URL Shortener Can Do (Features)
What can a URL shortener do beyond simply shortening a URL? Lots.
As time goes on, more and more features are packed into these services and here are just a few of the powerful marketing tools you’ll find a URL shortener can do for you.
Pixel Retargeting
Changing Endpoints
Deep Links
Traffic Routing
Custom Names
Password Protection
Webpage Overlays
So what does this mean for you? You have options.
Here are just a few of these features explained below. Before you choose a service, I’d encourage you you to consider what use cases you might encounter in the future and what features might be helpful.
Pixel Retargeting
Your website most likely has several ad pixels installed to leverage in running ads. When people go to your website, your pixels capture their behavior and use that data in deciding targeting that user for ads. But when you share a URL to someone else’s website, no data is sent to your pixel. Unless you use a URL shortening service that has pixel retargeting built in.
With this service, you can create a short URL to any website and when a user clicks it YOUR advertising pixel will fire, the user’s data will be captured, and then they’ll be redirected. This is a great way to leverage other people’s content to train your own pixel.
Changing URL Endpoint
The URL endpoint is where your shortened URL is sending people. Let’s say you have a podcast and inside the show notes for every episode you are using shortened URLs to point to recommended products, lead magnets, or another website and at some point, you decide you want to direct customers who click on one of those links to a new location.
You want to redirect the URL to a new endpoint.
Most URL shorteners will allow you to modify the endpoint of your shortened URLs. So instead of going into every podcast episode description and manually updating the URL, you can actually modify the URL endpoint one time within your shortening service and all instances of that URL will point to your new final destination. Super helpful.
Tracking with UTM Parameters
If you use UTM parameters, you know exactly what this is and you’re happy to see that URL shorteners have incorporated this featured. For those who don’t know, UTM parameters are the characters you’ll often see at the end of website URLs you click on. They come after the ? in a URL. The data contained in this string of text sends information back to your analytics tracking program letting you know where people are coming from. You can then use this ‘entry point’ data to see exactly where they’re going and what they’re doing.
Deep Links
Send someone using an iOS device to one destination and someone using an Android device to a different destination. Why would this be useful? If you have an app and want to use one URL in an email yet, when users with different devices click on the link, they will go to the appropriate location.
Limits On Custom Shortened URLs
Companies running URL shortening services will impose artificial and arbitrary limits on their services to entice you to pay more. The primary limit they impose is how many custom short urls can be created each month. If you go over this number the service will often just revert your links to their own branded URL.
For instance, if you are using Rebrandly and you go over the number of URLs you’re allotted for a month, instead of using cmpdnt.cc, your links will begin to show up as rebrand.ly.
Other limits imposed will be how many URLs you can customize. A custom URL link would be “cmpdnt.cc/my-custom-link/” as opposed to “cmpdnt.cc/38174dg/”.
If you want to bypass these limits, I highly recommend looking at newer startups or lifetime deal offers, such as those on Appsumo.
Setting Up Your Domain DNS
There are three difficult parts to setting up a custom url shortener:
Choosing your domain
Choosing a service
Setting up your domain DNS
Hopefully the article so far has helped you with the first two and now is where we’ll help you with the final one.
Domain DNS has become a lot easier to manage since the early days of purchasing domains. Most url shortening services will have exceptional instructions for how to setup the DNS on your website.
Instead of creating a step-by-step tutorial for all of them, we’ll share links to their own tutorials here:
With a limited number of branded URLs available, you may be wondering if you should still use a bit.ly domain. Here are two suggested use cases where you may consider the bit.ly domain.
You use your account to create a short URL for a friend, family, or a customer and do not want it to carry your branding.
You want to shorten and track a URL that is not associated with your business brand.
Otherwise, it is the best practice to use your branded URL for your business. It looks professional, it is consistent with your overall brand, and it will be an eye-catching URL when shared outside of people in your network.
No longer will you be the one noticing the fancy short URLs all the ‘big guys’ are using. As small is a custom short URL may seem, it will have a big impact on how people view your brand on social media, especially if it is just one part of a strong brand you are working hard to develop.
Final Thoughts on Custom Short URLs and Branded Links
If your business constantly deals with links and those links are vital to your survival, it would probably be worth hoping on the phone with the services providers you’re considering, letting them know your use case, and giving them an opportunity to educate you on how their service could improve your experience and the experience of your customers.
For most of us, we’re casual users and we don’t want to spend more money than we have to. Lifetime deals for custom url shortening services can save you a lot of money so grab one when it looks like a good deal.
The free options available are really more like a Costco sample than a free meal. They’ll give you an idea of what the app is like, exposure to some features, and provide you with just enough information to either decide if you want more of don’t really care for it.
You’ll most likely wind up paying for a service eventually, so make sure you sign up for a service that helps your business in the most important ways, be it branding, user experience, data, or reporting analytics.
Let’s talk audiograms! More specifically, the best podcast audiogram examples!
Have you seen those enticing posts on social media, featuring images from a podcast creator you follow? They usually look like a video or reel with an audio wave graphic and a snippet of a podcast episode.
They’re called podcast audiograms!
An audiogram is a graphic that can be used on social media and elsewhere to promote your podcast. These images are usually simple, fun, and easy to create—and they’re another tool in the arsenal of great content creation strategies.
In this article, we’ll go over what an audiogram is, how to make one, which apps you can use, and why audiograms are a smart content creation strategy for social media.
What Is An Audiogram?
A podcast audiogram is a visual representation of a short audio clip from a podcast. There are a lot of podcast networks popping up all over the web and they are bringing with them an influx of audiograms simply because they provide a lot of benefits for podcasters.
Audiograms are eye-catching. When it comes to images, a picture paints a thousand words, but when it comes to audio files, the possibilities are endless! As audiograms are naturally more engaging than static images or text posts, they’ll attract people who wouldn’t necessarily click on links.
There will be more people hearing about your podcast and making a decision about whether or not they want to listen to it.
Why You Should Use Podcast Audiograms In Your Content Marketing Strategy
Creating podcast audiograms provides a helpful tool for listeners to retain the information they hear. In addition, audiograms for podcasts give you another way to connect with potential new podcast subscribers. If they haven’t listened to your podcast yet, fans will be more likely to check out your podcast and audio content after seeing an audiogram featured on your social media feeds.
Podcast audiograms can be a really helpful way to deliver information, whether you’re providing a message to your audience or just sharing a lively conversation. You’ll be able to provide short poignant clips that deliver value from an episode without needing to listen to the entire episode. Your audience will be able to read the content rather than listening, which is more accessible and also accounts for those that scroll social without their volume on.
Podcast audiograms are a way to brand your podcast – people think you cannot see audio, but they’re wrong. Audio is represented by what are known as waveforms and waveforms visually represent what you’re hearing. They’re a bit boring on their own but when you surround them with the colors, logo, and even faces of your podcast, the audio comes to life.
Add words and you’ve done what some thought was impossible… make audio visual.
Audiograms are short clips of audio that can be used to promote podcasts, share episodes on social media, and more. They don’t have to be very long; in fact, they’re often just quick snippets. It is also possible to design audiograms in a way that suits the style and theme of your podcast.
For instance, here are three audiogram templates from the Ministry Pass Podcast Network ready to be shared!
An audiogram might contain sound effects like a crash, a chime, or musical interludes in the background that are. An example of this could be sounds from a new smartphone or tablet application if, for example, your series is about how people use technology every day.
Turn Podcast Audio Into Video Clips to Capture Attention
The entrepreneurs who are doing this well are ahead of the curve, getting a boost in their listener count, and a bump in their replay analytics. It can be difficult to market and promote your podcast if it’s only an audio file, so creating a visual form of the podcast content is key.
Visual content is key on social media because it helps to capture people’s attention. By creating a visual representation of your podcast, you make it easier for people to understand and engage with the content. Additionally, you’ll be able to grow traction using things like Instagram stories and Reels, as well as TikTok, channels that do not post raw audio podcast content.
Podcast audiograms can be a very effective way to deliver information about your product or service in an easily digestible format that makes it easier for people to find what they need quickly—and more importantly: remember where they found it!
Best Examples of Podcast Audiograms for Social Media
To help get you started with creating interesting audiogram videos for your own podcasts, we’ve collected lots of helpful examples in this article. These audiogram examples are meant to give you some inspiration and ideas about what is possible.
Truthfully, there are a lot of bad audiograms out there and finding a list of audiogram designs that do this shareable content justice has been pretty difficult to do. That said, we feel good about the list we’ve compiled below and we believe you’ll be inspired to create designs that are elegant and simple for your brand.
Here are some of the most influential people to follow on social media that use audiograms as a part of their content creation strategy:
Fully Free with Taylor Lee
Taylor Lee from Fully Free with Taylor Lee uses her audiogram as a way to engage listeners and connect with them on social media. This podcast is from coach Taylor Lee who focuses on business for women. Her audiograms mainly show up in Facebook or Instagram Stories and are varied over time.
David Tennant is a Scottish actor who has starred in many television series, including Doctor Who, Broadchurch, and Jessica Jones. His podcast uses audiograms on social media to promote his conversations with his guests.
Podcast But Outside used this clever audiogram over video of their interview about divorce with a woman on a street corner.
When we talk about audiograms we typically mean a wave pattern displayed over a static image, but technically you could leverage video of your podcast as ‘audiogram like’ content.
Bloomberg Podcasts use audiograms to promote lots of their episodes. This podcast audiogram from their show Odd Lots uses graphics to convey their points, featuring photos of two of their hosts.
The Financial Times’s Dan McCrum (@FD) and Paul Murphy (Tracy’s old boss) join #OddLots to talk about their multi-year effort to expose fraud at Wirecard, a German payments giant that went spectacularly belly-up
The Nerdette Podcast shared this on-topic graphic for their episode on mask wearing indoors during the pandemic. They also use captions at the bottom of this audiogram, shared on Twitter.
— Nerdette Podcast (@NerdettePodcast) May 28, 2022
The Art of Charm Podcast
The Art of Charm podcast creators used this graphic on Twitter for their podcast audiogram. With a video of the episode creation as the background and the title of the episode at the top, it would be easy for someone who isn’t a regular listener to find other episodes if they needed.
This is another example of using video footage from your podcast in your clip.
Who to ask for mentorship and who to avoid 🧐
We have to take risks in order to become great at anything, but what do you do if that risk stops you dead in your tracks?
— The Art of Charm | Podcast | Coaching Company (@TheArtOfCharm) June 30, 2022
Change Makers Podcast
Change Makers used an audio waveform with some static images in the background. One image features their guest, and the other is their podcast show graphic.
Marsha Acker, on her podcast, Defining Moments of Leadership with Marsha Acker, used an audiogram to share a crucial point from her conversation with her guest in this episode, Christopher Curley.
On the Instagram feed for the Screens in Focus podcast, you’ll find an audiogram talking about the episode’s subject matter – in this case, a specific episode of The Walking Dead.
Emma Dunwoody, a podcast content creator, shared this audiogram from her podcast in a vertical video format, with an audio wave and some background music.
Applications for Creating Podcast Audiograms from Free to Paid
There are lots of easy drag-and-drop creators if you’re creating your first podcast audiogram. Depending on how much time you want to spend designing your visuals, you have options.
There are many podcast audiogram creation apps from free to paid. If you want to spend money on your first audiogram, there are plenty of options out there. There are also easy drag-and-drop creators for those who aren’t into the technical side of things.
If this is your first time making an audiogram, try a free tool and see what it’s like. Decide how much time you wish to spend on creating this visual and make sure it fits into your schedule!
Create Your Own Audiogram Videos with Free Creator Apps
While there are many platforms that allow your audience to listen to podcasts directly from the audio player, audiograms offer a way for podcast creators to share short clips of their podcasts on social media, providing another way to develop brand awareness and allow potential subscribers to listen in without committing to an entire podcast episode.
Audiograms are visually enticing, simple to create, and easily shared… and on social media platforms that prioritize video, they offer a huge algorithm advantage over quote graphics or episode covers.
There are plenty of audiogram creator apps that are free to use and offer basic visual settings. If you prefer to have more control over the look and feel of your audiogram, there are also audiogram creator apps that let you customize every element. This comes at the cost of your time or the time of your team if they’re making them for you.
You can create audiograms in minutes with the following elements:
MP3 of your audio clip
Your podcast or company logo (preferably a transparent PNG)
An established color palette.
The result of using podcast audiograms? A smart collection of video content and efficient use of your time and podcast collateral.
If you don’t know how to make an audiogram, don’t worry! It’s super easy. You just need a few minutes, a desire to learn, and podcast content… oh, a computer, too. Even if you don’t have a podcast, you can still create an audiogram with any type of audio source.
Audiogram: Turn Audio Into Engaging Social Video
Audiogram is a program that turns audio into videos that can be shared on social media. It automatically transcribes captions making adding captions a breeze. It has a library of visually striking attention-grabbing templates that are always on-brand. The templates Audiogram offers are in all shapes and sizes for reaching new listeners everywhere.
Recast: Convert Podcast to Audiogram Video & Promote On Social Media
Recast makes it easy to create audiogram podcast videos in all formats. Businesses and professionals who want to create engaging video content for social media can use Recast easily. With options like text customization and complete branding control, your audiograms can match your social media feed’s aesthetic.
Headliner
Headliner is a program that helps you make videos to promote your podcast. You can add animations, captions, gifs, videos, and images to your videos, and then export and share them across your social accounts. It allows users to create unlimited videos for free and is optimized to promote podcasts on every social media platform. Headliner also has transcription capabilities that automatically caption videos. This makes it an ideal tool for podcast creators who want to reach a wider audience by providing captions with extra accessibility.
Descript: All-in-one audio & video editing, as easy as a doc.
Descript is an all-in-one audio and video editing tool that is as easy to use as a word processor. It has powerful transcription and screen recording features. It offers social video publishing and audiogram creation easily from its platform.
Descript is by far the most customizable audiogram creator by way of simple programs to operate. Yes, you could open up apps like Adobe Premier or Final Cut Pro X and find ways to bring to life a more customized design, but that involves an entirely different set of skills to complete.
If you’re just starting out, the prospect of using such a robust software can be daunting. Starting with an app that is just as capable but easier to use, like Descript, is a great way to hone your skills and also start promoting your podcast with audiograms.
Descript has long offered an audiogram generator feature in their downloadable desktop app. It allowed you to cycle through a fairly large collection of design options while still locking you into a small collection of design layouts.
This is no longer the case.
In the video below you can see just how much functionality Descript has built into their app and after watching you should have a pretty good idea of whether or not this is the type of featureset you’re looking for.
Increase Podcast Subscribers by Posting Podcast Audiogram Clips On Social Media
As a podcaster, you’re probably already aware of the importance of social media. Networks like Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook all have users that would be a perfect listener base for your podcast. If you have a podcast, making an audiogram for each social network is a great way to share your podcast in a unique way to each audience.
Social media networks are not just a place to post your latest episode; they’re where you can grow your listener base and build your brand. This is exactly where audiograms come in.
Once you’ve created your audiogram(s), all that’s left is posting them on social media! Just remember: don’t put too many out at once—you want people to be able to see each individual post without scrolling through tons of other posts first.
Creating Podcast Audiograms As Part of A Social Media Strategy
Audiograms are a smart part of a content creation strategy to build authority and community around your brand, your social media, and your podcast.
Upload your audiogram video to social media. Videos perform very well with organic reach.
Your podcast will now appear as a video in the network feed and users can get a taste of what your entire podcast is all about.
More people consuming samples of what you have to offer will translate into ideal listeners finding the full episode.
All of this equals more subscribers!
In order for your content creation strategy to work effectively, you need to plan your social media posts in advance. If you batch create your posts and write them in advance to post on a schedule, you’ve freed yourself up from needing to post in the moment.
If you encounter existing followers on social media, this can be beneficial as well. They may interact with your content the next time via social media, and not realize that you’ve released a new podcast episode. The podcast audiogram post on social media can serve as a reminder for them to listen to your newest episode.
For a podcaster, it helps give your prior episodes a little more traction after they’ve had their initial listener spike in your analytics and the traffic has died down. It can help you re-use content you’ve already created. This is an easy way to “pad” your social media posts with easy content to choose from. You won’t have to start every post from scratch because you’re working smarter, not harder.
By enticing your community and followers, you can highlight the meaningful conversations you’re having on your podcast. This strategy helps you make use of the content you’ve already created.
Saving and Organizing Your Podcast Audiograms with Your Other Content Marketing Materials
Campaign Donut is an amazing resource for housing all of your marketing collateral, like audiograms and podcast files. Not only can you store your data, you can email your listeners and your subscribers right from our platform. With each email, graphic, audio file, social sharing image, and more organized neatly, you save time every time you work on your marketing.
Repurpose Podcast Audio to Make Full Use of Your Content
If there’s a past episode with content that would be relevant to your social media following in the coming month, make an audiogram from some key parts of your podcast audio. Then, queue that podcast audiogram (using Campaign Donut) onto your social media channels.
Audiograms are a great way to drum up excitement for news podcasts episodes while leveraging great content from past episodes as marketing material.
Audiograms aren’t just for Podcast episodes… you can use them however you see fit! For instance… If you’re intending to be away from social media for a while (like on vacation), create an audiogram that tells people when they can expect to hear from you again—and then post an audiogram when you return. This will let them know that you are back and ready to take on business.
Podcast audiograms are an essential part of your marketing and should be included in your overall strategy for growth.
A well-planned podcast audiogram is an important part of your podcast strategy if you are looking to increase your social media presence. In addition to engaging listeners, it adds an additional level of exclusivity and personalization, which makes them feel like they’re part of something extra-special.
You’ll have better engagement, they’ll want to share this experience with their friends, and most importantly, they’ll become more invested in your brand.
There is no shortage of podcast audiogram tools out there, and it can be overwhelming to know which one to choose. In this article, we have highlighted some great examples to inspire you, and the apps we recommend are waiting for you to download so you can get started right away!
Create your first audiogram and tag us when you post it! We’d love to see what you create!
Links can get pretty ugly and the last thing you need for your business is to connect your beautiful, well-crafted, protected brand image along side a nasty, 230 character URL. That’s where URL shortener services come in handy.
There’s a good chance you’ve seen URL shortener services in action — and not even realized it. For those who may not be familiar with what a URL shortener is, we have you covered.
A URL shortener service takes a long, ugly, nonsensical website address URL, 50, 100, even 200 characters long, and shortens it to a more palatable and pleasing to the eye URL in a standardized format.
TL;DR – Which URL Shortener Is Best
Just want to know which URL shortener to use?
Cuttly is full featured and free, but no integrations. If you’re just looking for a simple URL shortener that provides statistics, Cuttly is hard to beat.
Rebrandly is powerful, affordable, and well integrated with other marketing tools and apps. It is not the cheapest, but it is the most forward thinking.
GoDaddy is hard to beat if all you need is a simple URL shortener and nothing else. It’s free to use as long as you have an account with them and integrates with domain names purchased through GoDaddy but not assigned to hosting.
An Example of How URL Shorteners Keep Things Clean and Simple
I have hosted a live stream nearly every week for over a half a year with Steve Edwards of Queen Valley Mule Ranch. During this live stream, Steve will mention a product, service, book, video, or any number of other resources. When he talks about a resource, I hop on the internet and find the link.
URL shortening becomes very helpful when sharing long links during live streams, keeping links visually appealing and preventing the chat feed from feeling spammy.
For instance, Steve mentioned Dr. Robert Miller’s book, Imprint Training of the Newborn Foal. As soon as he mentioned it, I went to Amazon to find the link and here is what that link looked like.
Not awful, but certainly not pretty for sharing in the comment section of a live stream. After finding the book on Amazon, I hopped over to a service called Bitly (which we will talk about more below) and shortened that URL to this URL:
Yes, there is a random string of numbers and letters at the end, but overall, the URL is easier to look at, and removes the attention from the URL itself and places it back on the actual item we’re sharing, Dr. Robert Miller’s book.
Amazon has it’s own custom branded URL shortener.
URL Shortener Features
While all URL shorteners effectively do the same thing – shorten long URLs, there is actually quite a variety of additional features offered through URL shortener services and these features are really what separates one service from another.
Custom Branded Short URL
The Amazon URL featured above is an example of the custom short URL — the URL domain is tailored to the Amazon brand, ‘amzn.to’. Another name for a custom short URL is branded short URL because the URL domain is matched to the brand.
A branded URL is a small and very effective way to increase the authority, trust, and legitimacy of your brand. Read our How to Create A Custom Short URL article if you’d like to create your own branded short URL.
Link Analytics and Statistics
While I can’t remember the first time I ever used a short URL, I do remember that link analytics and statistics was one of the reasons I started using them.
Not all, but many URL shorteners provide a varying range of statistics such as basic “how many people clicked this link” stats, visitor referral source (Facebook, email, direct), and origin location for each click.
Statistics and analytics provide greater insight into how your content is performing and what content you may want to amplify and evolve.
Mobile Links
Mobile links have become increasingly important in the last five years as more and more companies launch their own mobile apps.
Here’s how they work.
You receive an email on your phone from a service like Amazon letting you know about a product on sale. You click the link in the email and your Amazon app opens up, bringing the product up on your screen.
The mobile link is what triggers the Amazon app and without it, you’d be referred to the Amazon website through your browser. It may seem trivial, but user experience is increasingly important and for services that rely heavily on a mobile app experience over mobile website compatibility, the mobile link connects the user to the service more quickly and effectively.
While all of the other URL shortener features are still there, some services will use a shortening service specifically for the mobile link feature.
Traffic Routing
While not necessarily an everyday feature, there will be certain times when you may want to direct one user to one page and another user to a different page based on a specific criteria such as user country, user device, language, or other factors.
URL shortener services give you the ability to customize a user’s experience. As is the case with mobile links, it may not seem like an earth-moving feature, but to create a smoother experience catered to a user’s specific need, it is a very important feature.
URL Shortener Integrations
While it may not be immediately apparent why you would want to integrate a URL shortener with other services, as you further develop your content marketing strategy you’ll think up more ways to better represent your brand across every channel and in every location.
Integrating your URL shortener with social sharing tools, email services, and other content marketing tools is a very important feature set that is worth taking note of when you go to select a url shortener service.
Just to provide one example, if you’re using a social media scheduling tool such as Buffer or Hootsuite and want to use your own branded short URL, you will want to make sure that the service you choose has a native integration with the social media scheduling tool you use. Without a native integration, you’ll find yourself doing a lot of manual work or bypassing your shortener altogether.
URL Shortener Services — A Roundup
There is no shortage of URL shortener services. It is a very competitive niche that is evolving every month.
When I first began using URL shorteners in my social media posts, the two options I had to choose from were Bitly and Google’s own URL shortener. Since that time, dozens of services have appeared and Google’s service is no longer a thing.
Below is a roundup of the most worthy players in the URL shortening service.
Capsulink
Here is a summary of what Capsulink has to offer.
Key Features Offered by Capsulink
At the time of this writing, Capsulink doesn’t have a features page, but they do list some of the features in their home page copy. Here are those features taken from their homepage.
Broken Link Repair: Empower your short links to never lose traffic.
Branded Domains: Use custom domains to create branded short links.
Analytics: Analytical tools to optimize your marketing strategies.
At the time of this writing, Capsulink does not list or provide information on any native integrations with their service.
Free Plan
Capsulink has a very generous free plan, especially when compared to other services. Here are a few key points of the free plan: unlimited url shortening, basic statistics and 5,000 clicks per month.
One thing to note, the free plan does not include a custom domain for your shortener.
Paid Plans
Capsulink’s entry level plan, the Pro at $5 monthly, includes a single custom domain. All additional features that Capsulink offers are available on the Pro plan minus API access. Higher level plans include higher thresholds for number of custom domains, clicks, smart URLs, etc.
Features found in the paid plans include the following: expanded statistics, editable shortened URLs, password protected links, and default URL modification.
Rebrandly does a fantastic job of highlighting everything offered through their service. You’ll want to visit their features page for a full breakdown of what you can do with Rebrandly. Here are several of their most important features.
Workspaces and Teammates: For larger teams, this gives you the ability to organize and collaborate on large sets of links with different teammates, each one with their own unique access.
Analytics: A UTM link builder baked into the platform, individual link analytics, multiple report options.
Link Management: Editable destination URLs, custom URL slugs, link search, UTM presets, link expiration dates.
Traffic Routing: 301 SEO redirects, link retargeting, open graph control, links with emojis.
Rebrandly’s Native Integrations
This is one of the areas where Rebrandly shines over many of the other URL shortener services. Rebrandly has been very aggressive with building out native integrations and also includes integration with Zapier, which opens up hundreds of additional integrations.
Here are a few of the finer integrations offered by Rebrandly:
Productivity Integrations: Google Sheets Add-on, Slack
Social Media Integrations: Meet Edgar, Social Pilot, Viral Tag, Social Bee, TweetBot
Automation: Zoho Flow, Zapier
Free Plan
Rebrandly offers a very generous free plan that includes your own custom domain. In fact, you can have up to five custom domains on the free plan and shorten up to 500 links. If all you need is link shortening with a custom domain, the free plan will have you covered.
Paid Plans
The paid plans from Rebrandly are pretty competitive to price points by other URL shortener services and given the expansive features included, Rebrandly comes in at a good value. But just how good of a value? That will depend on which plan you pay for.
Rebrandly’s free plan is more generous than many other service’s entry level paid plans.
The lowest paid plan, the Starter, comes in at $29 monthly. That would seem high, except for the fact that the free plan is actually more feature packed than low level paid plans from other services. Each paid plan escalates the number of branded links you can create, total trackable links, and custom domain names you can use.
Unfortunately, Rebrandly does not make their entire feature set available across all plans. Enterprise features such as teams, API access, and mobile deep linking are only available on their enterprise plan at $499 monthly or via custom plan. Of course, if all you’re looking for is link shortening, this is a non issue.
The Starter plan is $29 and the next and most popular plan (according to their site) is the Pro plan and that comes in at $69 monthly. This plan really does open up the majority of the value Rebrandly has to offer. So while it might be a little more than other offerings, it does come with more value. It just depends on whether or not you need or want to pay the premium for some of the features Rebrandly offers that others don’t.
Bitly is the granddaddy of the URL shortening family. As I mentioned above, it was one of the two services I found when I first wanted to shorten URLs. The primary feature of Bitly is straight up link shortening for free. If you wanted to track your links, you could sign up for a free account, and after a while they allowed free accounts a custom domain.
Their paid plans were almost exclusively for enterprise customers and, if my memory serves me correctly, their plans began at around $1,000 monthly.
Around 2017 or 2018, Bitly made changes to their pricing structure in order to monetize the entry level users and their new paid plan is slightly more generous than their old plan used to be.
Bitly was one of the first tools to offer custom domain URLs and we have a tutorial, How to Create A Custom Short URL, that shows you how to go through the steps of creating your own custom short URL using Bitly
Here is a summary of what Bitly has to offer.
Key Features Offered by Bitly
The biggest value that Bitly offers has everything to do with the fact that they are integrated into everything. Because they’ve been around so long, nearly any service utilizing short urls integrates directly with Bitly, natively.
Aside from the native integrations, the Bitly feature set according to their website includes the following:
Link Shortening: You can use Bitly’s generic link shortener anytime and create an unlimited number of links without an account. If you want to monitor your links, you’ll need an account, free or paid.
Branded Links: You can add one custom domain on their entry level paid plan and if you have a customized plan, you can also have links created by other sites that use Bitly, use your custom domain (very cool).
Mobile Links: Directly route users to the right destination from your mobile communications.
Campaign Management & Analytics: Track and optimize every digital initiative using Bitly’s best-in-class analytics tools.
Bitly’s Native Integrations
Bitly has more integrations than you could ever want or need. Because it’s been around the longest and because it is the industry leader, there is a very high chance that Bitly will integrate with the tools you need to use for your business.
In addition to Zapier, they have a list of Help articles which outline some of the native integrations it offers. Check out Bitly’s integrations here.
Free Plan
As mentioned above, the free plan from Bitly has evolved over the years and is fairly minimal in its feature set and usefulness in its modern form. That said, yes, they do offer a free plan.
For the free plan you receive 1,000 shortened links, tagging, filtering, and customizing the back half of your links (50 links).
Paid Plan
After years without a consumer or entry level paid plan, Bitly introduced a single paid plan called Basic which is $35 monthly. This paid plan unlocks branded links, a higher number of links per month, and email support. If you have more specific needs or want access to features such as a baked-in UTM builder or mobile deep links you’ll need to contact Bitly about a customized plan.
Short.io gives you access to all of the features you’d expect from a shortening service and in very generous portions. Branded links, manage multiple domains, statistics, roles, tracking, and integrations! Yep, it’s all there.
In browsing their website, the one feature that stood out as particularly useful was the easy-to-interpret statistics dashboard. Short.io isn’t offering any different or special statistics. They are providing you the same data set that others provide. However, the way they provide them makes it much easier to interpret and understand how your links are performing.
Here is a list of other features offered by Short.io.
Branded Links: Customize your short URL, the original URL, link title, and manage your tags.
Multiple Domains & Subdomains: Create and manage domain and subdomain URLs.
Team Links: Form a team with a set of domains and group of members with different rights.
Campaign Tracking: Track online marketing campaigns using short URLs. Add UTM parameters to see traffic data in Google Analytics.
Short.io has an easy-to-interpret statistics dashboard that allows anyone to understand their short link’s performance.
Short.io’s Native Integrations
This is one area where Short.io is a little behind when it comes to their peers. Short.io does offer a Zapier integration which opens up the possibility of integrating with hundreds of apps. As far as native integrations, on their website they list the following:
Zapier
Slack — Create short links right from a Slack channel by typing ‘shorten’.
Segment — Send link statistics with one API to hundreds of tools for analytics.
Google Analytics — Send every click of your short link to Google Analytics.
Facebook Pixel — Retarget ads to people who clicked your short links.
Free Plan
Short.io’s free plan gives you access to every feature in their “Essentials” feature set. This includes secure SSL, tagging links, QR codes, UTM builder, custom domains, redirects, and tracked links.
When you’re on the free plan you are limited to one user, three custom domains, 1,000 total branded links, and 50,000 tracked links.
If you’re not yet ready to pay for a url shortening service but want to get a feel for all they have to offer, the Short.cm free plan is a great place to start.
Paid Plans
When you decide to upgrade to a paid plan with Short.io, you get a lot of value. Their entry level paid plan, Personal, is $20 monthly and increases your custom domains to 10, your total branded links to 10,000, and unlimited tracked links. You also gain access to country targeting, link expiration, link cloaking, referrer hiding, and password protection.
Should you want or need more — the next plan, Team, is $50 monthly and unlocks region targeting, deep links, and gives you the option of using a dedicated IP.
Should you need even more — perhaps for a large team, they do offer an Enterprise plan at $150 monthly and that unlocks the remainder of their features, including SSO, multiple teams, and other enterprise features.
Cuttly is a very interesting service because it is 100% absolutely free.
Cutt.ly lets you understand more about click-through of your links. We give you a huge marketing tool with advanced URLs tracking system for free without any hidden commitments. Why? Because we believe that the best things should be free.
Now, I’m not a lawyer, but I can read — and after going through their terms and conditions, it does appear that they really are giving away the service for free. Things can always change, but for now, it appears it is not too good to be true.
As I used the site more, I did see some ads which makes sense — they have to pay for their resources somehow.
Key Features for Cuttly
Cuttly offers everything that you would want. The best part (aside from the fact that it is free) is the interface is clean, straightforward, and easy to use.
Custom Domains & Branded: Use your own domain for your links. While it’s not clear if there is a limit to how many domains you can use, you can have multiple custom domains.
Customize Link Back Half: Change the url after the domain extension and backslash.
Link Statistics: See how your links are performing based upon total clicks, source of clicks, device information, browser information, and geographic location.
Cuttly’s Native Integrations
Integrations is where Cuttly may not be a viable solution for some. While Cuttly does offer API access, they do not integrate with any other software, tools or platforms — not even Zapier.
Because GoDaddy does not offer any type of integrations or stats, Cuttly still is a good solution if you thought the only bummer about GoDaddy was lack of link tracking. Cuttly definitely has link tracking and statistics.
Watch our short demo of Cuttly.
Free Plan
The only plan offered by Cuttly is a free plan which gives you unlimited access to all of their features. The website is banner ad supported and they do have an affiliate partnership with an eco friendly hosting company which has a presence throughout the platform.
Still, the free plan is equal to or better than paid plans provided you’re okay not integrating with other tools.
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, many services use their own custom short URLs which negates many of the needs to shorten them. A few services you will notice using their own branded URL include:
Twitter: Every link shared on Twitter, including links in Direct Messages, are shortened using Twitter’s URL shortener, http://t.co link.
Amazon: Links shortened on Bitly will convert to Amazon’s amzn.to URL and links created via Amazon’s affiliate program, as well.
Spotify: Links shortened on Bitly will convert to Spotify’s spoti.fi URL.
These are just three examples of links you’ll find are auto shortened when shared online.
Final Thoughts On URL Shortening Services
The best takeaway regarding URL shortening services is that there is a good fit for nearly anyone and nearly every use case. What’s more, URL shortening services have come a long way in regards to what they can do beyond just making links pretty.
The best way to choose the right URL shortener for you is to identify exactly what you need the tool to do and then find the service that does it at a cost that fits within your budget.
Social proof notification popups are being used on more and more websites as part an increase in growth marketing tactics. Maybe you’ve called them social proof ads or social proof marketing messages — regardless of what you call them, brands are using them and in great abundance.
You’ve seen these notifications across popular SaaS and e-commerce websites informing you that other individuals just like you are engaging with the service or product that you’re currently viewing.
We use social proof notifications for Campaign Donut as a way to get our free resources and upcoming events in front of new visitors who may not be aware of what we make available.
Social proof notifications are a great way to get specific information in front of users who are not familiar with your brand — WHILE creating trust between you and new users.
Learning how to use and integrate social proof notifications throughout your website is pretty straightforward and is something that nearly anyone can do.
Honestly, the hardest part of using social proof notifications is finding a service that meets your needs and your budget. There are all sorts of social proof apps and social proof softwares available, but which is right for you?
You’re in luck… helping you find a service that meets your needs and budget is what this post is all about!
How to Make Marketing Popup Notifications Work for You
The great thing about nearly every social proof app we include in our round up is that the notifications look good right out of the gate. You don’t need to make any changes or customizations to your notifications to have them look good on your website.
In addition, each service provider does a good job providing starting text for your notification. Maybe you’ll make a small tweak to the wording here or add a title there, but for the most part, you’re ready to publish within minutes of creating your account.
However, most people will want to go beyond using everything straight out of the box — you will, no doubt, want to make language and design changes to better integrate the marketing popups into your brand. So, in order to make social proof marketing work for you, here are a few suggestions regarding design, language, and integrations.
Design Your Social Proof Popups to Be On Brand
There are three elements to nearly every social proof notification: color, icon, and shape. Keeping these three elements consistent across all your social proof marketing popups is essential to finding success with social proof notifications.
Customizing Colors for Your Notifications
In regards to injecting color into your design, each social proof app will have different elements you can change color for. For instance, in the screenshot below we have customized the color for the name title and the Prove Source branding. The message text and the time stamp text is not editable.
Prove Source allows you to customize the color of the name and the Prove Source branding.
Take a look at a social proof example from a different service — instead of being able to customize the count and the text separately, all the text shares the same color.
Using the influence Bulk Activity live count notifications, all text shares the same color.
When choosing colors for your notifications it is important that all the colors be consistent across all notifications. Stick to a specific combination of colors — one primary, one accent, and one font color. Using different shades of colors throughout all your designs will lower brand consistency which in turn diminishes trust.
Selecting Icons and Images for Your Notification
Not all, but many social proof softwares will allow you to upload icons to your notifications. The default image is often a map or generic avatar — uploading icons allow you to inject your brand into the design and tighten up the overall brand experience on your website.
As great as being able to upload icons and images is, it can go sideways really quickly if the designs do not compliment the brand as a whole and are mismatched from one another.
At Campaign Donut we chose to have a set of custom icons created and we used those icons for our notifications to maintain consistency with our overall brand.
Should you choose to use your own icons and graphics on your notifications, use a family of images that are visually consistent with each other.
If you do not yet have a set of icons that you rely on for your brand, here are several places you can find large families of icons that will work for your brand:
Each social proof app will offer their own collection of pop up shapes customizations. The two most common shapes across all software developers is the rounded shape and the squared shape.
Some apps will have variations of rounded and squared. Some will allow you to choose the overall border radius. Whatever you choose, make sure to stay consistent across all your notifications. Using the same shape across all your notifications will create a stronger visual brand which will increase trust and brand value.
Social Proof Marketing Integrations
Integrating your social proof notifications into your current marketing stack is incredibly important — capturing conversions and sending live data updates to the notifications popping up on your site is the life-blood of the entire social proof notification concept.
The more integrations, the better — however, it is important to understand the crux of how most services will capture conversions and turn them into a popup.
The standard way of capturing data for a social proof notification popup is done with a small snippet of code placed on the same page as the capture form. This small snippet of code latches on to the form, captures the fields provided, and sends that data back to the service app and then uses that data to produce the notification popup.
For instance, you are running a webinar and you want to show a social proof notification on the registration page saying “Bob has registered for the SEO webinar” to encourage other visitors to register as well. In the header code of your registration page, you would place the small snippet of code to capture the name and location data of the person registering.
Once installed, the tracking code will pick up the name and location for every individual who registers for that webinar. The data will be sent back to the social proof app, and the app will push a new notification to the page or pages of your website where you want the notification to appear.
All but one of the services included in our roundup utilize this method of capture which works for any website where you have a form as well as the ability to inject code into the header of the page.
Social Proof WordPress Plugin
If you’re using WordPress you may be wondering, “Is there a social proof WordPress plugin I’ll need to install?” and the answer is maybe. Many social proof app developers will offer a WordPress plugin to either make installation easy for everyone and/or provide a deeper integration into the website itself.
It is worth noting that there are standalone social proof WordPress plugins that offer marketing and social proof without a third party service — however you must be using WordPress for them to run which means you won’t be able to integrate them into any website pages hosted outside of your WordPress install.
For this article we’re covering only third-party services because of their ability to integrate across all platforms including Shopify, Squarespace, Leadpages, Clickfunnels, and more.
Additional Integrations Beyond Form Capture
Beyond using the pixel method to capture submissions, there are direct integrations you may want to take advantage of, especially if you are using a shopping cart service.
For instance, a WooCommerce, Shopify, or Magento integration will not only generate a marketing notification saying “Bob from Phoenix just completed a purchase.” — it will also allow you to send more specific data to the popup such as what you see in the image below “Danna (Missouri, US) recently placed an order Downhill Hip Saddle Pad)”.
When you integrate your social proof notification service directly with a shopping cart, you can provide product specific information on orders that come through.
Beyond shopping cart integrations, you will want to consider additional integrations such as reviews (Google, Facebook), payment processing (Stripe), analytics (Google, Segment), email marketing service (Mailchimp, Drip, ActiveCampaign), and CRM apps (Pipedrive, Agile CRM).
Major Differences In Social Proof Notification Pricing
The primary pricing differentiator for all services we cover includes the ability to remove branding and total number of visitors per month to see your notifications. You will find there are other variables that may appear in different plans, such as dedicated support agent and number of domains you can install the service on, but visitor count and branding are the two big ones.
In almost all cases, you will have access to all features but will pay for a larger plan if you need more visitors. So, you may have access to activity notifications and live count notifications in a starter plan, but you’ll need a larger plan if your site visits exceed 1,000, 10,000, even 50,000 visitors in a one-month period.
When it comes to branding, you’ll find that these social proof apps will allow you to remove branding once you pay for a second or third tier plan. NOTE: Even in cases where your plan would allow you to remove branding, retaining the third-party branding provides an important and valuable ‘verified’ impact — increasing the trust and authenticity of the conversion.
Retaining the branding from your social proof service acts as a non-bias, third-party verification and can increase trust in the conversion and your company.
Personally, the reason I appreciate having the verification on my notifications is because I do not want to be accused of using a fake social proof plugin where I can create false registrations and conversions. Of course, there are always methods for working around this, but for the Campaign Donut brand, we want to do things the right way and build strong trust. We say “no” to using fake social proof plugins.
While there may be some cases where removing the branding is desirable, there are still many applications where it is advisable to retain the branding — especially if it can be customized to match the look of your site.
ProveSource | Skyrocket Your Conversions with Social Proof
Types of Notifications Available with Prove Source
Stream: The Prove Source Stream notification is the baseline notification that reports the actions individual people have taken on your website related to a specific conversion: signups, registrations, purchases, etc.
Informational: The Prove Source Informational notification allows you to present arbitrary information to your visitors such as guarantees and security statements.
Counter: The Prove Source Counter notification provides cumulative counts for recent actions taken on your website including how many visitors your site has had, how many purchases have been made, number of registrations, or how many current visitors are on your website.
Reviews: The Prove Source Review notification pulls a stream of individual reviews from Google, Trust Pilot, and Reviews.io.
Combo: The Prove Source Combo notification is similar to the Counter notification but is cumulative counts over a specified period of time.
Prove Source has a single notification widget style that is apparent across all notification types. There are small customizations allowed to each notification within the single style — but having the single style keeps brand uniformity in tact.
Biggest Advantage of Prove Source
In addition to offering multiple variations of notifications (listed above), Prove Source is incredibly easy to use. Minus some getting familiar with the terms and overall functionality of social proof notifications, Prove Source is intuitive and makes creating your first notification easy.
When you create your notification, Prove Source takes you through six steps to launch the notification live on the website. Each step is straight forward and the constant preview in the lower lefthand corner of the screen shows you exactly how your changes will look once the popup is live on your website.
Prove Source provides a variety of customizations from messaging, to icons, to colors. You can dial in almost any look you want using Prove Source.
In addition to the step-by-step prompts, each field inside each step is labeled, clearly informing you as to what each field is responsible for and educating you on the app’s capabilities.
Biggest Drawback of Prove Source
Prove Source provides few native integrations with its platform, relying on webhooks and third-party integrations to feed information to each notification. While not a huge deal, this does mean that either the platform you want to feed notifications from will need to work with webhooks or have an integration with a tool like Zapier.
Despite the limited integrations, Prove Source’s pixel code functions like most social proof apps and actually captures the user’s form input on the page where they take action. All you need to do is tell Prove Source which URL you would like to track actions from (be it filling out a form or otherwise) and then customize the message for that action. Prove Source will do the rest.
Prove Source Free Trial
Prove Source does not offer a “Free Trial” so-to-speak — rather they have a limited free plan available as well as a 14-day money back guarantee on their paid plans.
The free plan allows you to create one notification and limits you to 1,000 monthly visitors (which means your notifications can be seen by a maximum of 1,000 devices). The free plan does not allow for you to customize the branding of the Prove Source popup.
Should you want to have complete control right out of the gate and be able to create multiple notifications, they offer a money back guarantee.
The team from Prove Source has proven (no pun intended) to be reliable and helpful.
Prove Source Social Proof Notification Pricing
The pricing plans offered by Prove Source are very competitive, if not disruptive.
Next to the free plan, the lowest plan option from Prove Source is the $19 monthly Starter Plan and gives you access to all social proof marketing features, unlimited notifications, allows for 10,000 monthly visitors, but limits your ability to remove the Prove Source branding.
After the Start Plan comes the Growth Plan at $49 monthly and removes branding limitations and increases visitors to 50,000 monthly visitors. At this point, you have access to everything Prove Source has to offer.
Their Gorilla plan, which is the highest plan (before their unlimited option), is $199 monthly and allows for 500,000 visitors per month. This is where Prove Source is really disruptive. This same plan can run twice, even three times as much on other platforms with similar features, making Prove Source a great value.
Fomo | Social Proof Marketing Platform
Fomo is a very popular social proof notification popup option. On our agency side, we have actually used Fomo for clients. There is a lot to like about Fomo, including nearly all features available at the entry level plan.
Fomo handles notifications differently than most of the social proof apps. Instead of creating a notification to display, Fomo integrates with services and generates notifications based upon the events which are pushed from the services to Fomo.
Fomo does utilize the form capture option described above — but the strongest customizations come through their direct integrations.
Examples of Fomo Notification Popups
The design of each Fomo widget definitely has a distinct look unique to Fomo. While many other services parody one another, Fomo’s native styling is different and has a branded flare to it.
You can choose the single style you’d like to use in Fomo’s Theme section and once selected, you can customize the padding, text color, and link color of your notification in addition to dialing in specific CSS rules you’d like to apply.
Biggest Advantage of Fomo
Fomo allows for a lot of customization to your notifications. From colors, to images, to fonts, to merge fields — you can do A LOT to dial in your notification to look, feel, and say exactly what you want. As of this writing, they offer seven different notification popup templates.
Fomo also has A LOT of native integrations. Whereas some social proof popup services will claim “thousands of integrations” delivered through third party tools, Fomo offers direct integrations with dozens of popular services.
Biggest Drawback of Fomo
Fomo is complicated to use. It probably didn’t help that a great deal of their support documentation was out of date and referencing an old user interface. The documentation being out of date required us to constantly seek help directly from their team which slowed down our ability to implement even the simplest changes.
While our email provider was supported natively, to dial in popups for specific actions taken by our users inside of our email system, we needed to contact support to have those notifications configured.
If we had more patience to become Fomo experts there would definitely be a lot to enjoy.
Fomo Free Trial
Fomo does offer a 14-day free trial. After signing up for the free trial, we were given access to their Essential plan.
Their support was great when our account was live and when it was time to cancel our account, there were no problems.
Fomo Social Proof Notification Pricing
Fomo is on the more affordable end of the spectrum, given that their essential plan has access to all features minus A/B Split Testing and API Implementation Support.
The main difference between the plans is how many notifications you’ll be allowed to display per month. As of this writing, the Essential Plan runs $39 monthly and includes 50,000 notifications across unlimited domains.
The middle tier Plus Plan is $79 monthly and includes 250,000 notifications per month.
Finally, the third and highest tier is the Advanced Plan which provides 3,000,000 notifications per month plus API Implementation Support, Managed A/B Split Testing, and Optimization Support. The Optimization Support costs $29 for users of other plans and is described on their website as the following service: “For a $29 one time fee, our team of technical support engineers will personally inspect your setup and implement improvements to help you get the most of Fomo.”
Proof | Increase Website Conversions With Social Proof
Proof was the very first social proof notification service we tried at Campaign Donut. It has an “industry leader” feel to the brand, the product interface, and the actual notification itself. Nearly everything about Proof feels polished and professional, making it a great option for getting started with displaying social proof marketing notifications on your website.
Activity: The Proof Activity notification is the standard feed of showing an individual user’s specific conversion action. This is the feed to show a registration, lead generation, purchase, or other individual action.
Live Visitor Count: The Proof Live Visitor Count notification is a cumulative count on current visitors on a particular domain or a particular page.
Hot Streak: The Proof Hot Streak notification shows how many cumulative actions were taken by all users for either page visits or conversions in a 24 hour time period. For page visits, you can either select specific page visits or page visits across the entire domain. For conversions, the notification will specify how many users completed the specified goal for the campaign.
Conversion Card: The Proof Conversion card allows you to send an informational prompt, void of any metrics, encouraging users to take a particular action.
Examples of Proof Notification Popups
Each Proof notification widget maintains a consistent Proof style across the entire line. Aside from customizing the message, there are two overall ‘looks’ you can choose from for your widget: rounded corners or boxy corners. There are no color customizations (that we could find) and there are no style customizations (outside of the corner selection).
Biggest Advantage of Proof
The biggest advantage of Proof is they are viewed as the industry leader. How is that an advantage? They continue to innovate and come up with new ways to leverage the in browser proof notification for marketing.
The entire concept of social proof notifications is simple and each service delivers an end result that is almost identical to what you could get from another service — Proof separates itself from parody by innovating.
In the last year they’ve added split testing and goals — two items that other companies have since copied to their own platform.
After using Proof for nearly a year, it was clear they were committed to evolving their platform and adding new experimental features.
Biggest Drawback of Proof
If you’re looking for a drawback of Proof, the pricing will certainly give you a reason for pause. Their pricing is, by far, the most expensive for the social proof app space.
While many services will offer a free plan or an entry level plan in the teens, Proof starts at $29 monthly for their Basic Monthly plan. In addition to being a more expensive entry level plan, they also strip out a considerable number of features, reserved for their Pro and Business plans. They also limit the number of visitors to 1,000 which is on par with other free plans.
When we first began using Proof, configuring our notifications was very simple and easy to customize. With the introduction of Goals and A/B Split Testing, the process became confusing because of compulsory nature of these new features.
In an effort to provide more evidence to customers that Proof helps increase conversions, it is now mandatory to create a goal and run A/B Split Testing.
When we went to create a new notification that could not be tracked using their goal feature, we were still required to create and associate a goal — no way around it. After speaking with support we discovered that we could choose an arbitrary goal just to get past the screen. Once past, we were required to run an A/B Split Test. Even though we could make the decision to send all traffic to our Proof widget, the interface still showed A/B Split Testing, which was aggravating since we did not want to run a split test.
It is worth underscoring that their team is super responsive, very kind, and was receptive to the feedback we provided about the service being priced too high.
Proof Free Trial
Proof does offer a 14-day free trial for all of their plans.
Their support has always been responsive and quick to reply, helping you make the most of your free trial.
Proof Social Proof Notification Pricing
As mentioned above, Proof is expensive. After your free trial expires, you’re looking at $29 monthly. On the Basic Plan Monthly you receive 1,000 visitors per month and do not have access to Live Visitor Counts, Conversion Cards, Hot Streaks, or Priority Support (thought it’s not clear what the difference is between priority and standard support).
Proof provides an increase on your visitor limit when you pay for an annual plan.
The next pricing point is their Pro Plan which is $79 monthly. When you choose this plan, you receive 10,000 monthly visitors, Live Visitor Counts, and Hot Streaks. Unfortunately, you will still not have access to their entire feature set: Conversion Cards are reserved for the next plan.
The third pricing option is the Business Plan which is $129 monthly. On this plan, you finally receive access to all features and 50,000 visitors per month.
Beyond the Business Plan, each step provides additional visitors — no additional features. Their top monthly plan is $299 and includes 300,000 visitors.
Purchasing any plan on an annual basis does provide a slight cost reduction.
One notable item missing is the ability to remove or customize branding. When you search their help center for the option to remove branding, they do offer to remove branding for those on the Business plan and higher — though it has to be done manually and is either an all or nothing proposition.
We actually don’t mind leaving the Verified by Proof branding, especially because when users click on the link they are taken to a page that explains what “Verified by Proof” actually means. It is a nice marketing touch that we haven’t seen anywhere else.
Provely | Boost Conversions Adding Social Proof to Any Site
Provely is a unique option when compared to the other services listed in this rundown. Nearly all services allow you to display your notifications across all websites, Provely separates its three plans by defining the number of domains on which your notifications can appear.
Another point of difference is that Provely does not limit visitor counts for your account — which is something other services will charge $799 monthly and higher to enable.
Provely offers only the conversion/activity notification. While creating your conversion notification, there is an option to enable Live Counters within a conversion/activity notification — but live counters are not available on their own.
Examples of Provely Notification Popups
Provely offers seven different notification base designs. This is more than any other service we’ve profiled. Beyond selecting your base design, you are able to customize the color of the name, text, time stamp, and select either map icon or generic avatar.
Biggest Advantage of Using Provely
The price point plus the unlimited visitors is the clear advantage Provely has over their competition. While other services may have a low price point or offer unlimited visitors, there are no other services that offer both disruptive pricing plus unlimited visitors.
The unlimited visitors feature may not be as important for individuals using Provely’s single domain plan (after all, many websites don’t eclipse 50,000 monthly visitors — much less, 10,000), however, for those who are using social proof ads on multiple websites (and for clients), the unlimited visitor feature will be ideal.
Biggest Drawbacks of Provely
The impression Provely created with its website is largely confirmed immediately after purchasing Provely and then using the app. I would describe the overall experience as “unpolished” and shifty.
Immediately after signing up for Provely, you’re presented with two additional opportunities to spend money. This is pretty typical for info products but feels a little unscrupulous for a software product. These bump and tripwire offers left me wondering if Provely is a legitimate software company.
Once you log into the website, the process of creating your notification feels unpolished and clunky — as if there wasn’t much thought put into the workflow experience and it was built just to function.
For some, this may not be a drawback. However, after interacting with other services for the purpose of writing this article, the Provely interface feels like a dramatic downgrade.
Provely provides a large selection of notification designs, but the customization to those designs are minimal, including limited options for fonts and images.
All that said, the functionality is there, the product works, and Provely delivers exactly what it claims on the sales page — how it delivers on its promise leaves something to be desired.
Provely Free Trial
Provely does not offer a free trial, but does provide a 30-day money back guarantee. We signed up for their smallest plan to check out the product and when we requested a refund they provided it the same day.
Provely Social Proof Notification Pricing
The pricing for Provely is very straightforward and very affordable. The differentiator between each plan is the number of domains you can install their social proof app on.
The least expensive plan, Basic, is $17 monthly and allows you to run Provely on a single domain.
The second plan, the Pro, is $27 monthly and allows Provely to run on up to five domains.
The third, and most expensive plan is the Ultimate which unlocks all domain restrictions and allows Provely to run on as many domains as you’d like.
There is an approximate 50% discount for purchasing Provely annually and with a 30-day money back guarantee, it’s a great way to try the product and secure great savings!
Morevago | Display Reviews, Build Trust, and Get New Customers
Morevago social proof notification services focuses their attention on displaying reviews as the primary driver of social proof for customers. Unlike the other social proof apps featured in this round up, Morevago does not automatically capture your conversions or track your site activity in real time — you manually add your reviews and notification content to each campaign you’d like to run.
Morevago offers one type of notification called a Sticky Review. What makes the Sticky Review unique is that you can customize the individual item to say whatever you would like. So while technically speaking you only have one notification available, in theory you could create an unlimited amount of notification types by customizing the Sticky Review to suit your needs.
Examples of Morevago Notification Popups
There are five designs to choose from with the Morevago service — and with each campaign you can customize the notification background color, heading color, and text color.
Because Morevago chooses to handle the individual notifications, Sticky Reviews, separate from campaigns, this means that you can apply one Sticky Review to multiple campaigns and each review you use will take on the unique design traits of each campaign.
Unfortunately, when you’re designing your campaign notification style, there is no preview of your work — you have to wait until the changes are published to view them on your website.
Biggest Advantage of Morevago
Being able to create a custom stream of unique reviews and notifications and assign them to a myriad of campaigns is a capability not offered by any other service we’ve tried. To be able to create a notification that brings in your best reviews from all across the internet — including email and chat bot messages — is incredibly valuable.
Also, the ability to run a single “Sticky Review” across multiple campaigns could be very useful in some circumstances.
Biggest Drawback of Morevago
Originally, we were going to list the biggest drawback as not automatically capturing new conversions as they happen or bringing in reviews when they’re published to various reviews sites — however, since this is what makes Morevago uniquely different, we couldn’t list it as a drawback.
The primary drawback with Morevago is a lack of savvy and artistic design. This drawback applies not only in the app experience itself, but also the individual notification designs.
Looking at the same notification styles below, there is a clear drop off in quality of design.
The entire design is lacking which will diminish the ability to brand your notifications and take more time to dial in those which you would choose to use. Still, for some the ability to custom create notifications will be a great benefit and shouldn’t be removed as a reason to overlook the design shortcomings.
Morevago Free Trial
Morevago does offer a 14-day free trial by providing a credit card during sign up. Once logged in, it is very easy to cancel your account without needing to contact customer support.
Morevago Social Proof Notification Pricing
There are only two differences between Morevago plans: number of domains and removable branding. The entry level pricing for Morevago comes in at $14.99 monthly for what they call the Starter plan. This plan does not include the ability to remove the Morevago logo and limits your notification installation to a single domain.
The second plan is the $19.99 Plus plan which allows you to use Morevago on a single domain like the Starter, but with Plus you can remove the Morevago logo.
The Premium plan is the third tier and is $29.99 monthly, providing you with the ability to install Morevago on up to 5 domains.
The final plan listed on their site is the Agency plan which is $197 monthly and allows for you to install Morevago on unlimited domains.
Proof Factor | Free Plugins to Increase Your Conversions
Proof Factor feels like a straight-forward social proof app right from the moment you first arrive on their website. The middle of the road pricing with robust feature set makes Proof Factor a strong value. Proof Factor goes one step further than other competitors by introducing exit intent triggers and interactive gaming into the experience.
Types of Notifications Available with Proof Factor
Proof Factor is limited to two notifications and what they call the Fortune Wheel Email Pop Up.
Recent Activity: The Proof Factor Recent Activity notification is for displaying the individual conversions you want to track and report on. This would be your email opt-ins, sales, and registrations.
Live User Count: The Proof Factor Live User Count notification shows a cumulative number for how many users are currently visiting a specific page or specific website.
Aggregate Visitor Count: The Proof Factor Aggregate Visitor Count notification shows how many visitors have viewed a specific page or specific website within a specified period of time (hour, day, week, month).
Fortune Wheel: The Proof Factor Fortune Wheel is an interactive game popup that uses a “spin-the-wheel” style of game to entice users to signup or purchase your products.
Examples of Proof Factor Notification Popups
Proof Factor offers two design options for their notifications: rounded and squared. In addition, they provide you with the ability to add custom CSS to change the notification appearance to suit your tastes. This would include changing colors for background, border, text, as well as link.
Biggest Advantage of Proof Factor
When you compare all the social proof notification services to one another, there is one major advantage of Proof Factor over the rest of the competition — the Budding Entrepreneur plan.
This plan is 100% free, gives you access to the entire suite of products and allows for up to 1,000 visitors per month. What this speaks to is the overall value provided in Proof Factor. Whether you are just testing an idea or have a solid product ready to sell, you only pay when you use their platform beyond the 1,000 visitors.
What’s more, Proof Factor’s system is very easy to use so you’re not sacrificing functionality for cost — you can log in and create high end notifications easily, right away!
Biggest Drawback of Proof Factor
It’s difficult to find any drawback of Proof Factor, especially with a very generous free plan. The one area there could be growth would be in the overall design options for notifications. There are really only two options — rounded and squared. While it’s nice to have CSS to play with, if you’re uncomfortable editing CSS, you’ll find the color options easier to work with using other apps mentioned in this list.
Still, if you can live with the minimal design options, Proof Factor offers great value.
Proof Factor Free Trial
As already stated, Proof Factor offers something much better than a Free Trial — a generous free plan.
The Budding Entrepreneur plan is free to use and the only limitation in terms of feature set is a maximum of 1,000 visitors per month. They do note that free plans get Live Chat Support, however, the paid plans receive higher levels of support.
Factor Proof Social Proof Notification Pricing
After the Budding Entrepreneur free plan comes the Small Business plan which is $29 monthly. This plan increases your monthly visitor count from 1,000 to 10,000 unique visitors. The Small Business plan comes with what Proof Factor calls “Premium Support” though I am not sure what that includes.
The third tier plan is the High Traffic Site and that increase your visitor count all the way to 50,000 per month and includes what they call “Elite Support” again, not sure what is included in Elite Support that isn’t included in Premium Support.
Finally, there are three plans that Proof Factor calls “Larger Plans” and those range in price from $179 monthly to $429 monthly. All Larger Plans receive “Dedicated Support Team” and include 100,000 to 500,000 visitors monthly.
The value of Proof Factor pricing is really seen in the Small Business and High Traffic Site plans.
Influence | Increase Conversion Rate by 17% Using Social Proof!
Out of all the services I’ve included in this round up, Influence is the newest. In spite of being the newest, it actually has a lot going for it and, in some ways, is ahead of other services which have been around much longer. Influence includes access to all the standard notifications you would expect from a social proof notification service and has several additional features in the works (not live as of this writing) that could catapult it past competitors.
As of Summer 2019, Influence has three active notification types. When configuring a campaign, they have an additional three notifications in development which look intriguing and, quite honestly, exciting!
Bulk Activity: The Influence Bulk Activity notification shows the number of total signups for the campaign over a specified period of hours or days.
Recent Activity: The Influence Recent Activity notification shows the individual conversions for the campaign.
Live Visitor Count: The Influence Live Visitor Count notification displays the total number of visitors across the website. This notification can also be configured to display the number of live stream viewers on the site.
Review Notifications (Coming Soon): The Influence Review popup will allow you to show customer reviews through social proof notifications. There is no information on whether this is automatic or if reviews will need to be entered manually.
Custom Notification (Coming Soon): The Influence Custom Notification popup is described by Influence as having the ability to “show custom content” without any additional details.
Push Notifications (Coming Soon): It is not yet clear how the Influence Push Notification feature will work or what it will do. When I reached out to support, they didn’t provide any additional info.
Examples of Influence Notification Popups
The notification design styles available from Influence are very simple and largely mimic what we see from other social proof apps. With each notification you have the ability to customize the radius of the corners, allowing you to make them rounded out or squared.
Biggest Advantage of Influence
There is a lot to love about Influence, including the pricing. The biggest advantage I see with Influence is how easy it is to use. Since it’s a newer company, there are some interface design tweaks that should be made, however, overall it is straightforward and easy to figure out.
A second advantage is that Influence appears poised to grow beyond simple notifications — which could be a good thing or bad thing in the long run, depending on how their wide feature set impacts overall development of core features. However, it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
Biggest Drawback of Influence
If you’re looking for a reason not to use Influence, the biggest drawback in my mind is that it is very new and there may be a lot of uncertainty around it’s long-term viability.
Other concerns that come with a new company is a lack of support documentation. When setting up my first campaign I couldn’t find explanations for certain features in the knowledge base, leaving me to rely on chat support. Chat support was speedy — though it appears there may be a language barrier to overcome when chatting with support in the future.
There are dashboard design tweaks that I’d like to see, tightening up the UI with better color selections for borders, fields, text, and other UI elements — but I suspect these will come.
Influence Free Trial
All plans from Influence are available as a 7-day free trial. Seven days is a bit short, especially if you are wanting to measure conversions to decide if Influence moves the needle for your business — 14 to 21 days would be preferable, however, having a free trial at all is still nice.
Influence Social Proof Notification Pricing
Influence has four plans shared on their website — for larger plans than what is listed, you can contact them directly. There are three differences that separate plans: visitor count, removable branding, teammate accounts. Teammate accounts are essentially additional users able to access your account and make changes based upon the permissions you’ve assigned. After your free trial, you will land in one of the following plans.
The first and least expensive plan is called the Startups plan, it comes in at $15 monthly and provides you with 10,000 visitors per month. The second plan, the Growth plan (50,000 visitors), is $39 monthly and both the Startups and the Growth plans do not provide you with Teammate Accounts and you are unable to remove Influence branding.
The third and fourth plans, Advanced $65 monthly and Enterprise at $189 monthly, are identical except for visitor counts. Advanced provides 100,000 visitors per month and the Enterprise provides 500,000 visitors per month. Each of these accounts offer Removable Branding and Teammate Accounts.
Additional Social Proof Notification Services to Consider
New services continue to pop up across the web, each one offering unique and distinct benefits, separating themselves from other services.
Here is a list of additional services you may want to check out in your quest to find the right social proof notification app for your business.
Final Thoughts On Using Social Proof Marketing Notifications
Just because you can use social proof notifications on your website does not mean that you should. It really depends on your brand story and the relationship you have with visitors to your website prior to them making any type of a purchase.
For small e-commerce sites that are largely unknown and potential customers wonder, “Can I trust this company?” social proof marketing makes sense.
For the large software business that is well-established and has a strong relationship with their users prior to any type of financial transaction, it could feel gimmicky and even over the top.
Be sure to think through how your target audience will respond to notifications and try to anticipate what impact their response will have on what they believe about your business — from there, you should be in a good position to make a decision.
If you have any questions about adding a social proof app to your website, or how to best use the notifications for your brand, send us a message or leave a comment below. In some cases we may be able to provide a quick solution, in other cases we may redirect you to the app’s support.
In the end, the entire team at Campaign Donut is here to empower you to create content marketing campaigns that convert and however we can help make that a reality for you, we’ll stand ready to act!
Looking for the best YouTube thumbnails? Wanting to find inspiration to create your own custom thumbnail designs? You’re in the right place!
Creating custom thumbnails is not only a great way to elevate your brand as a whole, but it’s also a way to influence viewers to choose your video out of all the options available. No, a custom thumbnail will not make your content better than it is so it’s important to focus on creating quality content — but the thumbnail will help your AWESOME content get noticed!
In truth, we started down this trail when creating our own video thumbnails for Campaign Donut. We wanted to provide our design team with examples of what engaging YouTube thumbnails looked like. In the end, our first design turned out a bit different thank much of what we saw and that was entirely because of the type of content we were serving up in our initial videos.
You can see our final thumbnail design at the end of this article.
Creating Great Thumbnails for YouTube Videos
As mentioned above, you want your thumbnails to be branded and engaging. There are a few common traits we identified in the YouTube thumbnails below.
Brand Colors
Large Text
Obvious Primary Object or Subject
Minimal Words
Dynamic Images
Custom Backgrounds
In addition to these traits above, it was also clear that creating cutouts, or masked images, of the primary subject was very a popular design choice for those who have the time, money, staff, or skill necessary to pull it off.
What Makes YouTube Thumbnails Important
Designing images for YouTube is much different than designing for a social network or create webinar promotional images. Why? Because your brand will be sharing real estate with dozens of other brands. Check out the image below.
Out of all the information available to you during a YouTube search, the element that receives the most real estate is thumbnail.
The thumbnail, by far, is the element that draws the most attention without even looking directly at it. Also, notice what is getting the most real estate? The thumbnail.
As you explore the collection of video thumbnails we put together, remember that it will be important to make your thumbnail design your own. Don’t put pressure on yourself to duplicate a design perfectly or to get your graphic just right.
The best news is that you can always go back to any videos in your library and update the thumbnails in the future if your custom YouTube thumbnails don’t turn out to be exactly what you wanted.
Not all brands go out of their way to get creative with their YouTube thumbnail design. Actually, the majority of channels we looked at while trying to find great examples of YouTube Thumbnails, those channels didn’t do anything at all — they didn’t even select a unique thumbnail.
These examples below show several channels that utilize very simple thumbnails with one or two elements to comprise their designs.
In contrast to many of the examples above, we took a more “instructional” approach to our YouTube thumbnails. The videos we were creating were more about providing a specific solution to a specific problem — rather than discovery.
Here are a few examples of instructional video thumbnails that you can use for inspiration if you’re considering the same approach to your videos.
After taking a look through the designs above, you should have a few ideas for your design. Some of the examples, such as the ahrefs designs, are more advanced than others and you may want to enlist the help of a designer if you are to pull off those designs.
Something else to consider is the scaleability of your designs. In other words, will you pursue a design that is more templated that requires you just changing out background, text, and colors or will you pursue a design that will require a professional illustrator to create new designs? The NBA designs are a good example of templated designs that are easy to reproduce. Anyone with basic design skills can easily create new templates with updated content. The thumbnails from Justin Brown will require completely new designs and updated masked images to keep up with over the months ahead.
At Campaign Donut we have a full time design team that can produce anything we need. However, we didn’t always have that luxury. Prior to our team, we enlisted unlimited graphic design services that helped us handle new design mock ups and overall production. If you are not a designer and you do not have your own in-pocket designer, give unlimited graphic design services a look.
Final Thoughts On Custom Video Thumbnails
If you have any question about creating your own custom thumbnails, creating thumbnail design templates, or enlisting design services to help create your thumbnails, send us a message or leave a comment below. Sometimes all you need is another brain thinking through what you’re working on — other times you just need a specific answer to a specific problem… either way, we’re here to help!
