You did it. You finally convinced the the higher-ups at your company to forgo the status quo and upgrade your clunky and outdated website.

Great! So what’s next? Well, now comes the hard part where you need to figure out what content and imagery needs to go onto your website.

So how do you organize and present your entire team’s thoughts and web ideas?

Well, you can start with our Free Content Outline For Web Projects. Check it out below and grab your copy and then read on to learn how to use it.

What is a content outline and why do I need one?

A content outline is a collaborative document that helps teams outline their content requirements for web projects.

Your team can use this document to brainstorm together and develop your primary and secondary page list, individual page sections, content ideas, and even the exact content that will go on your website.

When should I build a content outline?

From a high level, your website project will look something like this:

1. Define Audience
2. Define Goals and Strategy
3. Build Sitemap
4. Build Content Outline
5. Build Wireframes
6. Build Design… Develop… Deliver… Refine…

As you can see, before the content outline is built, you need to have the audience defined along with the goals and strategy for the website.

So before you build your content outline, you should ensure you understand your customer personas and what actions you are trying to have users take on your website.

Most companies have a good idea as to who their target market is, however, many don’t have a true understanding of their customer personas. Before you build your website make sure you clearly understand the user’s goals, pains, challenges, behaviors, and habits. You should also understand what type of messaging resonates with your personas.

After building your personas, make sure that you understand what the goal of your website will be. Are you trying to sign users up for a free trial? Demo? Provide information?

The goal of your website not only affects your call to action but also your supporting content and imagery, so make sure this is clear from the onset.

Once you have a firm understanding of your customer personas and the goal of the website, you’ll be ready to start your content outline!

There are 7 main steps to completing your outline that include:

1. Building your collaborative team
2. Building your list of primary and secondary pages
3. Deciding the goal of each page and what sections to include
4. Brainstorming content for each section
5. Collaborating with your team of experts
6. Collaborating with designers and developers
7. Deciding on your final copy and handing it off

Let’s start with building your team!

Build your collaborative team

“None of us is as smart as all of us.” –Ken Blanchard

Building a website for a B2B startup is no easy task, and no single person is going to be able to tackle the project themselves. You’ll likely want multiple stakeholders from your marketing team, executive team, sales team, along with subject matter experts in your company to chime in at various times.

Each one of these individuals brings their own unique perspectives on the products or services being offered, which helps ensure that small details about the offering or customer persona are not forgotten.

Before diving into your content outline, make sure you’ve assembled a small but knowledgeable team that will assist with this project.

Build a list of primary and secondary pages

Once you’ve built your project team, take some time to build a list of primary and secondary pages that you may want to include.

You can think of your list of primary pages as the items that would be on your top-level menu. These will be the big buckets that your other subpages fit under.

When the HUSL team completed CloudCheckr’s website, their content outline included:

1. Home
2. Solutions
3. Product
4. Partners
5. Pricing
6. Resources
7. Customers

Secondary pages are great opportunities to be persona-driven and target more specific needs. For CloudCheckr, we worked closely with their team to break the solutions section down into industry-specific secondary pages, while breaking the platform section down into cost/benefit specific secondary pages.

When filling in your template, simply use the top section to brainstorm and jot down page ideas.

Decide the goal of each page

Now that you have a good idea as to the pages that you’ll have on your website, it’s time to brainstorm the content that will go on these pages.

Start by defining a specific goal for your page. Think about what you want your users to get from each page and what actions you want them to take. This could mean signing users up for a demo after educating them on a specific benefit or having them interact with your chat widget to get more information.

After deciding the goal of your page, think about what features or functionality you’d like to see on the page. This could be a video of a specific part of your tool, a certain type of CTA, a certain popup, or an important section. Once that brainstorming is complete, you can start to define each section of your web pages.

Brainstorm content ideas for each section

Defining the sections of your website helps give your site much-needed structure as you think through the content. These sections can be designated for things like a hero image or video, social proof, blog snippets, benefit explanation, and feature lists among many others.

To use your content template, start by brainstorming your ideal list of sections. Remember that you can always remove sections so get down as many good ideas as you and your team can think of. From your list of sections, start to think through the type of content that you want in each section. This could be:

– A Headline
– Subheadline
– Video
– CTA
– Copy ideas
– Animation
– Illustration

In the section notes, you should then start to piece together how you’d like the content pieces that you listed above to fit together. Do you want a product screenshot aligned to the left with a list of bullet points with a spring animation on the right? Write it in this section!

Finally, you can start to fill in what your actual copy may be. Remember that this is just your initial draft so it doesn’t need to be perfect or complete.

Discuss with your experts

At this point, you have a strong idea of what your website will look like and what content will be included. Now it’s time to make sure that your entire team is onboard. Bring in your subject matter experts, marketing team members, sales team members, and executive team to review and comment on the work you’ve already completed.

If you’re using our template as a Google Doc you can simply share the document with your team members so they can comment.

We recommend sharing the document, having your team comment, and then bringing everyone together to meet and discuss things more deeply. It’s important to give every stakeholder an opportunity to voice their unique opinions and concerns.

Once you’ve met with your entire project team you can go back and refine your template.

Collaborate with your designers and developers

Your content template still does not need to be 100% done before talking to your designers and developers, but having it as complete as possible will help the conversation.

Having a content template that you have thought through will help either an agency or your in-house designers think through what is possible and how much time and resources it will take to build your ideal website.

Decide on final copy and handoff

In reality, the copy of your website is never “Final”, however it’s great to have your baseline copy that you can test or iterate on going forward.

After you’ve brainstormed with your designers and developers, you can go back and refine your copy even further. Be sure to continue the project as a collaborative effort between each member of your team and give everyone a chance to comment on this round of changes.

Ideally, you’ll have your outline to a point where you can hand it off to the designers and developers to start their work. Remember, this does not need to be 100% finished at this point and there will likely be changes as the project progresses. Now you have a great starting point and a clear guide.

We talk to dozens of startups every month about their marketing needs, and one of the first questions we ask is “What is your marketing budget?”

Most of the time, the answer that we get back is a blank stare accompanied by a shrug.

If this is you, don’t feel bad. You certainly aren’t the only one.

You’re busy doing things like:

• Creating content
• Building ad campaigns
• Aligning your messaging with sales
• Building key relationships
• Refining your persona’s
• Iterating the website
• Being an all-around amazing marketer

So it’s understandable that you haven’t quite gotten around to building a marketing budget. But when you need to make large marketing investments (like building a website) and when investors need to understand marketing spend, you’ll want to have a budget.

So, how do you start?

In this post we’re going to detail:

• Why you need a marketing budget
• How you can align your budget with your business goals
• Ways you can build a budget
• How to keep your budget on track

Build Your Marketing Budget Quickly with This Template

Don’t spend time reinventing the wheel when we already have a proven marketing budget used by B2B startups. This template pack includes two marketing budgets that you can use to track your marketing budget, actual expenses, and variance.

Why do you need a marketing budget

Growing marketing teams are often working on multiple growth initiatives at any given time.

You’re likely have teams that are working on paid acquisition, social media, PR, content marketing, video, and site development, and each of these initiatives will have different budgetary needs.

By creating budgets for each one of these needs you ensure that:

1. Teams prove they are creating growth: B2B marketing comes down to finding the best ways to drive the most leads for the least amount of money. If you aren’t tracking your marketing initiatives separately and properly, you will lack insight into what is really working and what can be discontinued. A budget helps marketing teams understand the total amount spent on a given marketing initiative.
2. Teams provide reasoning for the budget: Every startup needs to understand and plan for their “burn rate”. This means that your finance team is going to be looking at marketing to identify and justify its investment. Having an outline of your needs will help ensure your entire company (and investors) understand where the money is going.
3. Teams are using the budget: If teams don’t have a need for the budget and can’t justify funds being allocated toward them, the funds can be used somewhere else to help the company meet its goals.

Building the budget

There are a few common ways that companies decide on what the overall marketing budget.

1. Goal-Based Budgeting: Goal-based budgeting is a great option for companies with historical growth data and specific goals. If you know how much it will cost you as a company to obtain a customer, and you also know your growth goal, then you can back into your specific growth goal. For instance, if you know it costs your $100 for a lead, and you need 100 leads to make your 25 sale goal, then you need to budget for $10,000 ($100×100). If possible, this is ideal for startups.
2. Percentage of Sales Based Budgeting: For companies that don’t have as much historical data to understand how marketing spend will affect growth, you can use the percentage of sales method. This budgeting method simply takes a percentage of the company’s total revenue and allocates it to marketing.
3. Top-down budgeting: Many startups, especially early-stage startups, end up using the top down budgeting for the sake of simplicity. This method simply has an executive, usually, the CEO or CFO, decide what the company can afford to spend each month or quarter.

All of these methods can be effective in certain situations, however, high growth startups are likely going to want to budget based on their expected scale. If you can, goal-based budgeting.

How do you ensure your budget aligns with your company’s needs?

As a startup, you likely have limited funds to allocate to marketing or any other department at your company. So you need to prioritize what initiatives in your department get funding and how much.

To help you decide what initiatives get funding, you need to first think about your goals as a marketing organization, and as a company. You should take into account your company’s goals for growth, product development, and market development.

Once you have an understanding of these goals, prioritize the projects that most help you achieve these goals.

Use your marketing team’s performance marketing analytics to analyze each one of your initiatives to understand at a high level what is driving results.

Stay on track

A budget doesn’t do you much good if you don’t stay on track and keep up with it. That’s why we’ve built an easy to use marketing budget template to help you track your budget. Even with that budget, there are a few things you can do to make sure you’re on track.

Make accurate estimates

The best way to stay on track is to make sure your project estimates are accurate from the beginning. It will be difficult to achieve 100% accuracy, but there are two ways that you can create estimates that will help.

1. Use last years actual costs to estimate what this year’s costs will be. If you’re doing a project that is nearly identical to what you have done previously, then this can be effective
2. Have your team leaders or project managers break each project down into steps or sections. Estimate how much each one of those steps will cost and use those numbers to build a project budget.

Watch out for hidden costs

One of the biggest reasons for budget inaccuracies is hidden costs. Small things like service fees, additional redesigns, and assets, legal costs, and taxes.

To ensure nothing creeps up on you, make sure you work with your project teams and any agencies to ensure you have as accurate of an estimate as possible that includes any fringe costs. Once you have this accurate estimate, give yourself a small cushion in your budget just in case things go awry.

Track your spend

Once you have an idea of how much you’ll be spending on each initiative, you need to hold yourself and your team accountable for hitting their numbers.

You can use a marketing budget in something as simple as Excel to track all of your expenses. At the end of every week when you follow up with your teams on their projects, ask them about their marketing spend.

Then just update your document with your numbers. The HUSL Marketing Budget Template has an automatic variance calculator.

Using Your Budget

First, make sure you download your budget templates here.

Got it? Alright!

You’ll see that each template is broken down into monthly, quarterly, and yearly spend. In the vertical monthly column, you can see your project totals, along with your budget vs. actual project variance.

At the end of every quarterly period, you’ll see the quarterly budget, actual, and variance totals.

You can see your spend totals across all categories at the bottom of your template.

Your yearly totals will be in the very last column on the right.

Things to remember

1. Columns marked in bold are hard-coded with a formula, so don’t enter data over them!
2. You can add and remove any rows that you want. Simply right-click and add/delete rows as you need!
3. Don’t forget the graphs at the end of the template! Use these to get a quick visual display of your budget.

There it is! Now you have all you need to create and document your marketing budget.

We are recognized as a top Inbound Marketing Company on DesignRush. Reach out to us if you’re interested in learning more.

As both a social media and digital marketing authority, Facebook is a major driver of the “next big thing.”

From branded pages and social reader apps to an emphasis on visuals and in-feed videos, Facebook has a stranglehold on the way public figures, celebrities and brands present themselves on its adaptive social network.

The latest groundbreaking installment? Live-streaming, real-time video—known as Facebook Live. With the addition of Facebook Live, however, the rich, famous and popular aren’t the only ones who stand to benefit—so too do up-and-coming startups. How, exactly? Facebook Live makes it possible for startups to broadcast videos of just about anything to a huge, ever-expanding audience.

In recent years, smartphone apps like Meerkat and Periscope have taken to the mobile market, placing live-streaming video capabilities into the pockets and purses of people everywhere. Facebook Live is different, though, because of its reach. With one out of every five people on earth having an active Facebook account, the potential for brand building and consumer reach is bigger than it’s ever been before.

Facebook Live Is for Startups

Startups stand to benefit from Facebook Live’s low barrier to entry. To begin broadcasting, the process is simple. At the top of the iOS or Android Facebook app, hit is the “New Status” button. After that, select the live broadcast option—it’s a head with small waves coming out of it. Write a short, engaging description, then select “Go Live.”

That’s it! You’re now live on the newsfeeds of all of your Facebook friends, though you can modify your audience, limiting it to members of certain groups or events. They can watch and comment as you continue with your broadcast for up to 30 minutes. Needless to say, with this kind of platform, high-growth startups have the potential to see big reward by getting involved earlier than competitors, rather than waiting for Facebook Live to solidify itself as a must-have of digital marketing.

While much of the Facebook Live footage you’ll see in its first few months of use will come from individual users, there are many ways your startup should consider using the innovative tool. Here are five suggestions to get you started en route to building a large, loyal following:

1) Provide an Insider’s Glimpse

Take a look at any successful Instagram for business account and you’ll notice that the brand does an excellent job of giving its fans a behind-the-scenes look at what goes on at the company. To help generate inspiration, imagine that you’ve been asked to give a tour of your business to friends and family members—the same things you’d show them are those that could be presented while on Facebook Live.

Don’t just limit yourself to the office, either! Take viewers out into the field, connecting them with customers, warehouse workers, conventions and retreats. The possibilities for this kind of branding are limitless. Remember, what might seem mundane to you could very well be of interest to incoming fans of your startup.

2) Live Q&A Sessions

When it comes to Q&A sessions, planning is of the utmost importance. Using your startup’s social networks and email list, tell people the specific day and time you’ll be using Facebook Live to answer questions. As you start to see success from these Q&A segments, feel free to make them a weekly or monthly occurrence.

Additionally, this is an excellent way to conduct free market research for your startup. Take the most frequent questions, comments and concerns you hear and build blogs posts, infographics and video tutorials around them. By so doing, you use your social media savvy to improve your other content marketing efforts, as well.

3) How-To Videos

The trick here is to find the right balance between a subject that both pertains to your startup’s area of expertise and the interests of those who plan to tune in. For example, if your startup were to specialize in iOS app development, it might be interesting to host a Facebook Live session on the basics of Objective-C.

Don’t choose subjects that are too confusing or complex—stay sweet, short and to the point. When you approach Facebook Live as a means of providing real, genuine value to your brand fans, they’re more likely to come back to you when they’re in need of your products or services. You are passionate about what you do. Use how-to videos to spread this passion through Facebook Live.

4) Product and Service Demonstrations

According to KissMetrics, those who watch a product or service video are 64% – 85% more likely to make a purchase. In addition to placing a demo video on your landing page or website, make one in real-time using Facebook Live.

This how-to can be more authentic and allow you to present the more personal side of your products and services. You could even combine this method with a Q&A session for optimum audience engagement and impact. By putting your customer’s understanding first, you’ll begin to build a solid brand reputation.

5) Breaking News Features

Depending on your startup’s niche, this one can be more difficult. That said, regardless of the industry in which you work, there’s news that’s taking place. By taking to Facebook Live to either break or talk about these kinds of updates, you position your startup as the go-to outlet for up-to-date information.

To help with this, set up an RSS feed on your laptop or desktop. As larger, more authoritative sites publish industry-specific stories, take to Facebook Live to talk about what this means for your startup, fanbase and industry as a whole. Though a startup, you’re the authority. When people need information, they should first come to you.

• Note: Regardless of the method you use to build rapport with your Facebook followers through Facebook Live, always keep in mind that the videos you create should never be solely focused on your brand. Yes, you directly represent your startup, but it’s important to peel back the layers a bit and present your true self. Be personal; people will appreciate it.

Repurposing Facebook Live Videos

For startups looking to use Facebook Live, it’s not enough to use the video publishing tool by itself. Instead, make certain that you’re also repurposing your video content as much as possible.

With a lack of funds sometimes being an obstacle for startups, save yourself some video production fees and use your Facebook Live videos for social posts on other channels or as cornerstone content for future blog posts. Look to stretch the value of each Facebook Live video.

Conclusion

Today, it’s Facebook Live; tomorrow, it will probably be something else. Whatever happens, with social media marketing now solidly a mainstay of the digital marketing world, it’s key for your startup’s success that you pay close attention to what Facebook is doing. Currently, this means tapping into the game-changing powers of Facebook Live.

What do you think about the new live-streaming outlet? Do you plan to use it for your business? If so, in what way? If not, what’s your reasoning? Let us know on Twitter or Facebook.