Thursday, October 22, 2015

Need Marketing Inspiration? Here Are 12 Places to Find Great Examples

In the marketing world, like most facets of life and business, there's a lot of pressure to come up with original ideas. 

Trouble is, with seemingly millions of ideas being executed on a daily basis, it can be tough to cook up something truly original -- that's okay. An idea doesn't have to be unique to be great. In fact, there are some really awesome examples of great marketing out there that you can lean on to inspire your next project. (Austin Kleon calls this concept "stealing like an artist.")

But finding these examples isn't always easy. That's where we come in. We've collected 12 places on the web where you can browse and search for examples of great marketing -- including website design, design in general, email marketing, and social media pages. Check them out, bookmark them, and use them to inspire your own marketing strategy.

Get 50 brilliant examples of website design now by downloading our free flipbook.

12 Places to Find Examples of Great Marketing

1) Crayon 

Whenever I'm looking for examples of beautiful website design, Crayon is the first place I go. Their database has over 15 million webpages -- everything from homepages to blogs to landing pages.

Looking for webpage design for a specific industry, content management system (CMS), device, or traffic volume? No problem: For each of those categories, there are dozens of filters to choose from. It truly is a one-stop shop.

2) Awwwards 

Like Crayon, Awwwards is chock full of examples of website design, landing pages, and so on. It's not just a collection of these designs, though: Every example on here is either a nominee or a winner of one of their awards for design, creativity, and innovation on the web. Their examples tend to include more examples of unique, digital "experiences," rather than just cut-and-dry webpages.

They have some advanced filtering options to streamline your browsing. The categories you can filter by include things like "technology," "design agencies," "promotional," "ecommerce," and "hotel/restaurant." You can also filter by color if you're looking for inspiration for a particular color scheme. Finally, they have a lot of international examples to browse through, and you can even filter by country.

3) The Best of Email 

Looking for email marketing inspiration? Check out The Best of Email's "Inspiration Gallery," which has great examples of all kinds of emails you can sort through by type: newsletter signup pages, welcome emails, sale emails, holiday emails, birthday emails ... the list goes on. You can subscribe to their daily newsletter if you're in the market for inspiration on a regular basis.

4) Big Little Details 

This resource focuses on the nitty gritty details of web design that can make it so helpful, delightful, and inspiring. They're curated via submission by Floris Dekker, senior product design manager at Etsy, and digital designer and developer Andrew McCarthy.

The posts themselves are super short -- each one simply highlights a helpful design feature. Take the post below, for example: If your Twitter login attempt doesn't work, Twitter offers to email you a one-click login link. Someone at Twitter thought through that little design detail and put it on the website, and these folks thought it was worth sharing:

5) HubSpot Academy

HubSpot Academy serves as a great resource for "HubSpot-approved best practices in action." To make it easy to navigate, you can filter by page type. -- blogs, landing pages, calls-to-action, thank-you pages, etc. You can also filter by category, like B2B, B2C, education, or nonprofits.

While the examples include only websites that were built using HubSpot's software, they're a great place to browse for ideas and inspiration.

HubSpot Academy's library also includes emails and lead nurturing examples that serve as great inspiration for your efforts. All you have to do is filter by one of those two categories.

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6) The HubSpot Marketing Blog

If you're looking for even more examples of "HubSpot-approved" marketing inspiration, we also have a ton of resources available on our blog. From social media to email to website design, the following posts represent some of our best roundups for inspiring great ideas.

Website Design

Email Marketing

Social Media

7) Abduzeedo's Collections

Abduzeedo's "Collections" section of their website is an awesome place to browse examples of cool design, from package design to desktop wallpapers to illustrations. What's especially great about these examples is that they're often accompanied by a short description or introduction, which helps put the designs in context or explain what makes them so great.

You can either browse all of their collections at once by recency, or you can sort by category, including architecture, logos, photography, typography, and more.

8) Dribbble 

Dribbble calls themselves a "show and tell for designers." It's a community of designers who share screenshots of their work, process, and projects -- making it an awesome place to find design examples. Whether you're looking for inspiration in graphic design, illustrations, icons, typography, logos, or something else, you'll be able to find it on this site.

Each screenshot is called a "shot," and you can browse shots by popularity, recency, designer, or by "featured playoffs." Playoffs are "shots with rebounds from multiple players" -- in other words, they're shots that a lot of other designers have interacted with and shared.

9) Pinterest 

Never underestimate Pinterest as a resource for great design examples. We use it all the time to look for design examples like infographics, ebook covers, and page layouts.

Simply type a few keywords in the search bar, press enter, and scroll. They aren't curated, of course, so you'll have to sort through to find the good ones.

10) Creative Bloq 

You may know Creative Bloq for their articles on graphic design, infographics, typography, branding, and illustration. Turns out they have some really well curated "example" articles in a similar style to our own on the HubSpot blog. Here are a few of our favorites, and you can find others by searching for "examples" in the search bar.

11) Canva's Design School 

Canva's blog, "Design School," is another place with a wealth of articles on design tips, including great example posts. They're a little harder to find individually, but here are a few of our favorites:

12) Really Good Emails 

Really Good Emails is exactly what you think it is: a database of really good examples of email marketing. Its simple, Pinterest-style layout makes it super easy to browse. Another cool feature? When you click into an email, you'll be able to see both the desktop and mobile versions.

The categories are a little more ad hoc than many of the other resources on these list, but useful ones include things like abandoned cart emails, events emails, product launch emails, and so on. They also offer a weekly newsletter if you want to receive inspiration on the regular.

Which are your go-to resources for examples of great marketing? Share them with us in the comments.

50 examples of beautiful website design

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