Rnordman

Today’s conventional wisdom is that business buyers are using online information to educate themselves and that they’re delaying conversations with sales reps until later in the buying process.

Research from several sources has been used to support the conventional wisdom. For example, SiriusDecisions says that business buyers are now performing 67% of their buying process online. CEB and Forrester Research go even further and say, respectively, that business buyers are 57% or 67% through the buying process before they engage with salespeople.

These research findings have led many marketing industry thought leaders to advocate a model of B2B demand generation in which marketing plays the dominant role in lead acquisition and lead nurturing. Supporters of this view argue that buyer independence has made lead generation by sales reps less effective and more inefficient than in the past. This model also seems to match how most business buyers now prefer to obtain information.

The key word in the preceding sentence is most, because it’s also clear that some buyers still prefer to obtain information via sales reps. For example, research by ITSMA shows that many business buyers want to interact with salespeople earlier in the buying process than the other studies suggest.

In ITSMA’s 2012 How Buyers Consume Information Survey, over 70% of B2B technology buyers said they want to engage with sales reps before they identify a short list of preferred vendors. When asked at what stage of the buying process they find it useful to engage with salespeople, 24% of the respondents said during the “epiphany” stage (when they haven’t yet recognized a definite need but are learning and exploring possibilities), 23% chose the “awareness” stage (when they have an identified need and are clarifying objectives and researching alternatives), and 24% selected the “interest” stage (when they are identifying a list of preferred vendors).

The reality is that the B2B demand generation environment isn’t as simple as the conventional wisdom would suggest. It’s clear that a large majority of business buyers (probably 70% to 80%) are performing independent research before they interact with a sales rep. It’s also clear, however, that perhaps one in four buyers will turn to sales reps early in the buying process.

The important point here is that early engagement is vital to success, whether it’s created by content-based interactions or in-person interactions. Forrester Research says that solution providers who engage prospects early in the buying process win 74% of the deals, while the win rate of those who engage late in the process is only 26%. Early engagement probably isn’t the only cause of the higher win rate, but it’s clear that early prospect engagement plays a major role in successful demand generation.

The bottom line is, B2B companies must be ready to engage prospects on their terms. Marketing must have content resources that are specifically designed for early-stage buyers, and sales reps should always be leveraging their existing relationships (with both customers and non-customers) to uncover new opportunities.

As more and more startups like Airbnb, Etsy and Kickstarter crowd into the space of the collaborative economy, big brands are starting to get in on the action, too.  Staples sells products developed on Quirky; Avis has acquired Zipcar; Walgreens has partnered with TaskRabbit for delivery.

And those ventures are likely to be just the beginning, given how many people are already participating in the collaborative economy, and how much that’s likely to grow over the next year. There are now 113 million sharers in the US, the UK and Canada: 40% of the adult population. Those figures come from a survey of 90,112 people that we conducted for Sharing is the New Buying, a just-released report that I co-authored with Jeremiah Owyang of Crowd Companies and my Vision Critical colleague Andrew Grenville.

While the most established and widespread form of sharing consists of buying and selling pre-owned goods on sites like eBay and Craigslist, our survey revealed that a quarter of the population is now using the most recent generation of sharing services. These include peer-to-peer transportation and housing services like Uber and Airbnb, crowdfunding services like Kickstarter, product rental services like Rent the Runway, custom craft shops like Etsy, and task sites such as elance and Taskrabbit. Participation in every one of these emergent categories is poised to double within the next year.

No wonder big brands want in on the action: the growth of the collaborative economy promises to disrupt the conventional marketplace, as customers buy from one another — instead of from them.

But for those companies, engaging with this nascent market must go beyond latching onto a few hot collaborative startups by buying them or partnering with them. Established companies must grasp the core drivers behind this new economy, and understand how those drivers fit into their already established models. These core drivers are:

Less buying, more sharing. Big brands need to stop measuring success in terms of units sold, and think in terms of units used. The collaborative economy is shifting us from a consumerist economy to one in which people buy less because they’re sharing more. Instead of five families buying five cars, five families can share the equivalent of one car (using a combination of loaner vehicles and transportation-on-demand), reducing the overall number of products purchased. (Not incidentally, this also reduces the environmental footprint of all that car manufacturing.)

Companies that have traditionally relied on selling goods need to think about offering those goods on an access model, too – for example, as Daimler AG has done by providing by-the-minute car sharing through Car2Go. And those that offer services need to think about further offering their customers access to products well outside their traditional spheres, as with Westin’s partnership with New Balance to offer fitness gear rental for their guests.

Less consuming, more producing. The emergence of the collaborative economy is closely tied to the growth of the maker movement, in which individuals can become producers and sellers thanks to technologies that support small-scale production (like 3D printing) as well as those that facilitate peer-to-peer distribution (like online marketplaces).  As we found in our survey, on some kinds of sharing sites, such as those that share professional services or pre-owned goods, more than half of participants have been sellers or providers (and not just buyers and consumers) at some point in the past year.

To succeed in the collaborative economy, companies will need to integrate crowd-produced goods into their supply chain, as West Elm has done with Etsy. In fact, our data suggests that attracting small-scale producers and sellers is one area where any player could still find a competitive edge: while 79% of buyers are “very” or “extremely” satisfied with the value they got from their latest sharing transaction, only 60% of sellers were as satisfied with their earnings.

Less working, more freelancing. As a number of observers have pointed out, one effect of the collaborative economy may be to increase self-employment in place of full-time employment.  This means that companies will have new ways to source labor, but at a social cost: some argue that the ability to outsource via elance and TaskRabbit gives companies a (lower-wage) alternative to creating full-time positions. Meanwhile businesses that depend on skilled labor means that they’re not only competing with other employers to hire the best workers — they’re competing with the increasingly viable option of web-enabled self-employment.

Rather than engaging in a race to the bottom (on wages) or a fight to the top (competing for skilled labor), these companies would do well to focus on offering new value-added services enabled by the collaborative economy, as Home Depot did by partnering with Uber for Christmas Tree delivery.

Less regulation, more risk. One challenge that has bedeviled sharing startups is the emergence of regulatory efforts aimed at limiting sharing activity — or tapping it for tax revenue. Partly in response to pleas from established players like taxi and hotel companies, municipal governments have tried to corral the Wild West of sharing.

Yet the involvement of bigger companies in the sharing economy itself could instead strengthen the hand of those who would preserve currently low levels of regulation. Either way, unless big companies want to see their breakfast eaten by collaborative startups that profit by flying under the regulatory radar, they will need to tune into their customers with co-innovation initiatives that help them understand how they can play in this space, too.

The competitive pressures of the collaborative economy – and the ever-growing list of companies rising to meet them — attest to the urgency and inevitability of the entrance of big brands into this space.  It’s a disruption that big companies must not only address, but accelerate, unless they want to stand by and watch while their own business models and revenue streams are disrupted instead.

One of the first things I did before putting in an offer on a new home last summer was call my Internet provider. I wanted to know what kinds of speeds I could expect if I ended up living there. Fortunately, I got the all-clear – the fastest connections were indeed available – so my wife and I went ahead and ultimately bought the house.

It turns out I’m not some weird tech nerd with mixed-up priorities. A home’s Internet connectivity is becoming an increasingly vital selling feature, like a big backyard or a new roof, to the point where houses without good access are being valued up to 20% lower, according to real estate experts in the U.K.

Buyers are now typically considering fast broadband the “fourth utility,” after electricity, water and gas.

“The more demanding buyers now want fibre-optic superfast speeds as, whether working from home, streaming entertainment or managing the stack of equipment that now relies on this, a property needs to have 21st-century connectivity,” property expert Henry Pryor told The Guardian.

I couldn’t help but notice the overlap between this particular story and another one on broadband adoption in certain U.S. cities. Using heat maps to show high-speed diffusion, the Atlantic Cities article comes to some pretty clear conclusions – poorer neighbourhoods aren’t subscribing to broadband nearly as much as richer ones. San Antonio, Texas, provides a good example:

Households in and around the downtown business district overwhelmingly have broadband. But just west of Interstates 10 and 35, in the adjacent neighborhoods that are home to many of the city’s Hispanic poor, fewer than 20 per cent of households do.

The situation is similar in Canada, where more than 90% of the richest people use the Internet compared to only 62% in the poorest quartile.

Put together, it’s clear evidence of digital divides emerging and strengthening in several developed nations. As the Atlantic Cities article puts it, this is very important: “At stake isn’t the ability to stream House of Cards. It’s the ability to participate fully in a society that’s increasingly moving online.”

The post Forget the big backyard—home buyers increasingly look for fast Internet: Peter Nowak appeared first on Canadian Business.

Inbound marketing is all the rage.

Marketers are falling all over themselves to jump on the bandwagon, convinced that inbound is the path to more leads, less cost, and better business results across the board.

But there are problems with inbound marketing. It’s a strategy that can be tremendously successful, but only if done correctly.

Here are three ways inbound marketing might actually be hurting your business, and how to fix each problem.

Inbound Marketing Problem #1: Too Many Leads

Ironically, we often see a huge pile of entries in the “lead” part of the sales funnel in some of our client’s CRM records. They’ve got tons of leads in the pipeline, but very few making it past the initial lead stage.

Worse, we see that pile of leads just sitting there at the top of the funnel, neither moving forward, nor being removed from the list.

This happens when a company is using a variety of inbound methods—white papers, webinars, blogs, etc.—but doesn’t have a strong qualification process in place. They’re creating leads, but they don’t have a way to qualify those leads.

What good are unqualified leads to your sales staff? They can find those kinds of leads all on their own. They don’t need inbound marketing for that.

If your company shows this kind of pattern in its sales funnel, you’d be better off focusing on finding fewer, better prospects.

How to Fix It: Whether through automation, outsourcing, or good old fashioned phone call follow up, you must find a way to qualify your leads. Plus, you must time your campaigns so that you don’t create more leads than your qualifying processes can handle in a timely fashion.

Inbound Marketing Problem #2: The Wrong Leads

Want to drive a salesperson crazy? Give her a list of 15 “hot leads” that all turn out to be duds. Give her that kind of list more than once and you’ll lose her respect forever.

This is a key reason why salespeople in some organizations actually deprioritize leads they get from marketing, preferring to go after leads they generate themselves through traditional outbound marketing efforts.

It’s hard to blame them. They’ve got quotas to make and no time to waste chasing dead ends out in the field.

Meanwhile, the marketing team is busy patting itself on the back for how many “leads” they turned over to sales that quarter, regardless of whether a single one turned into a sale or not.

Your organization might not look quite that bad, but it does happen. We see it in sales funnels that have an unusually low conversion rate between the pitch and negotiation stages.

How to Fix It: As with the problem of too many leads, you must figure out how to qualify your leads quickly and correctly. That’s the only way to provide your sales force with the data they need to successfully and quickly follow up on inbound leads.

Inbound Marketing Problem #3: The Black Hole Between Marketing and Sales

Let’s say your marketing efforts are generating leads and you’ve got an effective lead qualification process in place.

If you’re still not increasing sales, check to see what’s happening between your marketing and sales teams.

I’ll bet you your lunch money you’ve got a time gap between when leads get qualified and when your sales staff actually follows up with the prospect.

Time kills sales. If you don’t follow up on leads quickly, you’ll lose them, simple as that. In fact, if you aren’t able to respond to a lead within 5 minutes, you’re probably leaving money on the table.

It’s surprising, because it seems so simple: decrease your response time, win more business. Yet very few businesses have figured out how to do this well. It’s a massive opportunity for anyone willing to put in the work to ensure prompt response to leads, however they come in.

How to Fix It: Awareness is the key to response times. If you aren’t currently measuring how fast your company responds to inbound leads, it’s time to start. Once you have your baseline, do whatever you can to speed up the process. The faster you can respond, the more money you’ll make.

Conclusion

Business fads cause companies to jump into strategies they don’t yet fully understand.

In the case of inbound marketing, inadequate lead qualification and poor response times are two of the biggest problems we see companies struggling with.

If you’ve been disappointed with your inbound marketing results, see if you can better qualify leads, find and clear the logjams in your sales funnel, and then find a way to decrease your response time.

Do those three things well, and you should start to see a better return on your inbound marketing investment.

 

Mike Kamo is the VP of marketing for Strideapp. Stride is a Cloud-based CRM and mobile app that helps small to medium sized agencies manage and track leads, as well as close more deals. They can be found on Twitter and Facebook.




 

Too many businesses make the mistake of using a B2C approach when engaging in B2B transactions. Interacting and catering to the end consumer is not the same as establishing relations with another enterprise. There must to be a whole different set of marketing objectives and strategies devised in order to form the much needed rapport when seeking to finalize that deal, sale or partnership with another company.

B2B vs. B2C: Similar but Fundamentally Different Approaches

There appears to be a prevailing mindset that marketing is marketing, and whether the audience is the consumers or corporations run by people in suits, you are still just marketing to people. What’s important to realize is that while corporate entities are still headed by people, they are buying a product or service for the business and not for themselves; there is a very different motivational and emotional experience involved between the two.

While B2C and B2B marketing both involve the same methods, such as SEO, social media and PPC, it’s the approach to the methods that differ. With any B2B endeavor, the following points should be taken into consideration.

B2B Relations Have More Complex Layers

With B2C, the needs of the consumer are pretty straightforward, and there is often minimal interaction between business and customer other than an occasional comment or enquiry. With B2B, the relationship is far more intricate and is typically an ongoing one. Not only do you need to focus on your client but you also need to consider the needs of your client’s consumers.

With B2B, there is much more back and forth interaction even long after the initial purchase or deal has been made. This may come in the form of further assistance, training or customer support. This is why trust is that much more crucial with B2B, and methods like contact through social media, email marketing and face-to-face meetings need to be about fostering a deeper level of confidence and understanding.

Emotional vs. Professional

When the end consumer purchases a product, it is often for the purpose of satisfying a basic human need or emotion. Think about someone who buys a weight loss supplement, for example: what are the motivational factors behind the purchase? It’s the hope and prospect of being able to achieve a new physique, being happy in one’s own skin, and fitting in a new pair of jeans. These are all emotionally driven factors that influence the purchase, and it’s these emotions that B2C marketing seeks to take advantage of to drive sales.

Now think about marketing that same weight loss supplement to a supplement and vitamin store. The motivational factors are more professional in scope and may include budget, business goals, and vendor relationships. To an extent, the business still needs to cater to the client’s consumers, but the main focus is on establishing that professional relationship between seller and client.

More Individualized and Tailored Marketing Required with B2B

In a B2C setting, once the demographic is identified, a single marketing theme and approach can be implemented to appeal to the emotions of that demographic to drive purchases and further inquiry. With B2B, on the other hand, your clients and their business goals are far more individualized. This means that once you generate your leads, your approach has to branch off to include multiple and customized marketing solutions to appeal to each individual client and their business model. Ultimately, this means more individual outreach.

B2B Marketing is a Whole Different Ball Game

B2B marketing objectives require a different set of thinking, brainstorming and plan execution. The different approaches for B2B and B2C are not interchangeable, and believing otherwise will only lead to dismal ROI numbers and leads that go nowhere.

Examples of 3 Facebook Applications that every B2B organisation needs on its brand page

You will know that on every brand’s Facebook Page there are four app thumbnails, three of which are customizable and whose positions can be moved. I’ve marked them 1 through 3 below.

Some companies choose to use this space only to feature their Page’s Like count or Facebook’s ‘Notes’ and ‘Map’ apps. These companies are not making the most of their precious Facebook real estate! In this article I’ll show examples of 3 better alternatives.

Essential apps for your Facebook page

Much like the cover photo, apps are a feature of the Page that capture the attention of Page visitors first. For B2B companies that want to squeeze the most value out of their Facebook Page, there are three essential apps that should live on the Page at all times:

1. Newsletter app
2. Resources app
3. Testimonials app.

• 1. Newsletter App

If your B2B company isn’t getting valuable data (like email addresses or customer insights) as a result of your Facebook efforts, you’re missing out on the true benefit of Facebook. One easy way to correct this: Create a newsletter app.

A newsletter app is advantageous for two reasons:

• 1. It enables you to build your newsletter list by encouraging your Facebook fans to become newsletter subscribers.
• 2. The email list you grow using your Newsletter app gives you a way to connect with your fans away from Facebook. This is huge. With list in hand, you can use it to drive sales through email marketing efforts.

The company ExactTarget has a great example of an effective newsletter app. What makes it effective? It shares the ‘Why’ first and then the ‘What.’ It’s okay if you’re a little confused right now. Let me explain.

• The ‘why’ explains a value or benefit. The ‘why’ on ExactTarget’s newsletter app is their headline: ‘Get the Competitive Advantage.’
• The ‘what’ often explains a business’s product, service or feature — it’s the thing that makes the ‘why’ possible. In the ExactTarget example, the ‘what’ is their newsletter.

The core message of ExactTarget’s newsletter app is: ‘Sign up for our email list and you will have the competitive advantage.’ Then they use easy-to-skim bullet points to list out their ‘why’. This is smart. And it’s one of the main reasons their newsletter app is so effective at capturing leads.

• 2. Resources App

I recently saw these insightful statistics on B2B content marketing from a 2014 report from the Content Marketing Institute that highlights the importance of featuring your key content marketing resources. Among the most important points:

• 93% of B2B marketers use content marketing
• 73% of B2B content marketers are producing more content than they did one year ago
• 44% of B2B marketers have a documented content strategy.

If your B2B company is included in the large percentage of companies that are investing in content marketing, a resources app can help give all that work great exposure.

Use a resources app (like the one ShortStack has created below), to house your most-popular, valuable and/or newest resources. On the app, provide direct downloads to PDFs you’ve created, link to must-read blog articles, videos, and much more. You can update your resources app weekly or monthly.

As any content-marketer knows, it’s easy for a really good piece of content to get buried. A resources app solves this problem. It puts your best content, the content that you’ve found produces the most conversions or shares for your B2B business  on full display and serves as a sort of index, exposing your ‘old’ content to new audiences.

• 3. Testimonials App

I made a jaw-dropping discovery over the holidays: Social media peer recommendations influence more holiday gift purchases than Amazon reviews (according to a study done by Crowdtap).

What this tells me is that social testimonials, aka the online version of word-of-marketing marketing, are powerful.

Peer recommendations are the key driver of purchases. There’s a reason most companies feature testimonials on their websites and Yelp reviews carry so much weight in the eyes of business owners. Testimonials work to inspire the trust and business of people who are not familiar with your company.

Easily incorporate the power of testimonials into your B2B business’s Facebook Page with a featured app. If you have a great product or service, put positive testimonials on full display by showcasing them on a Testimonials app.

The domain hosting company GoDaddy has a good example of a testimonials app. It pulls in reviews from GoDaddy’s customers. There’s also a ’25% off’ coupon on the app. So if an app visitor likes what they’ve read, they can sign up for GoDaddy on the spot, direct from their Facebook app. Pretty neat, huh?

There you have it, three essential apps every B2B needs on their Page.

If you’re a B2B, let me know in the comments below if you have any Facebook apps that are helping your brand get the most out of your Facebook Page.

This is the second part of a three-part interview series with Mark Roberge, Chief Revenue Officer and SVP of Inbound Sales at Hubspot.

For those of you who missed part 1 of this interview, Mark recently sat down with Base CEO, Uzi Shmilovici during an event by The Forecast Club in Boston. Roberge shares his story about how he and his team took Hubspot from a class project at MIT in 2005 to 80 million dollars in revenue in 2013. In part two of the interview, they talk inbound vs. outbound sales, transparency and big data. Let’s dive in.

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Uzi: You mentioned something, I think I captured between the lines, about inbound vs. outbound, inside vs. outside, so let’s talk about those two themes. Inbound marketing is sticking and we leverage the web to know much more about every lead that comes into our door. How does this change the sales process and how does this relate to inside vs. outside sales? How do you think about that? How do you think about this transition in relation to inbound and outbound sales?

Mark: Sure, we think about that a lot. I think when folks say, “What’s changing in sales, how is it different?” the common theme is that it’s going more and more inside. 20 years ago, you had to actually talk to a sales person just to do your buying process. They had information that you needed, and the best reps were very skilled at withholding that information in exchange for the information they wanted from you, like – who’s the decision maker? How much budget do you have? What are your needs?

But today, I can be in my slippers on Saturday night, after I put the kids to bed, and I can find the top 5 vendors in a space. I can find out what they do, how are they different from each other, and how much they are. I can often try the product for free, and I can buy it sometimes, right on the site. I go like, “Why do we need sales?” It’s a huge question, right?

And in sales, we have to step up our game to add value to that whole new ecosystem. We need to be there as consultants and advisors to our buyers. We need to do a better job when we engage with someone, to engage with them in their context. We need to do a better job understanding their specific goals, the specific challenges they’re trying to solve and translate that generic marketing that’s on our website to their business. We need to tell the story from their perspective, that’s the best reps that we have, that’s the skill that they actually possess.

So there’s something that we do at HubSpot around that.

All of our sales people, in their first month, do very little selling. Very little sales training, actually. They all start a blog or website using HubSpot software, and they go through the whole methodology.

They start blogging, they build a following on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. They start optimizing their site with SEO, they create many pages and run A/B tests to convert them, they run email campaigns, they segment, they use the whole HubSpot software package. By the time they’re on the phone and the second month rolls around, they’ve actually started to understand SEO and blogging more than some of the marketers they’re talking to who have been in the space for 20 years.

So that’s one area that I push people on– the more you can replicate the people that you sell to, walk in their shoes, help them feel that pain, they’ll be able to be better consultative sellers, and really succeed in this new climate.

The other opportunity is being thought leaders themselves. For example, last year I closed a deal with a Fortune 500 company here locally. The VP of Sales sent me an e-mail and said, “Mark, I need to go to lunch you and my VP of Marketing. We need some help.”  And I said, “Great, I’ll be in your office tomorrow.” He says, “Nope, we’ll come to you, don’t worry.” So I said, “Great, pick my favorite lunch place.” I headed over and they spilled to me their whole problem set. Their visitors, leads, trials, conversion rates, where they thought they were off from the industry benchmark, etc. We spent 90 minutes and I shared everything I knew about it –and how we could help solve their problems. We just scribbled it out, worked through the whole process. When the check came, I reached for my wallet and they said: “Thank you very much, this was fantastic, we’ve got this.”

It took me 60 days to get the deal through procurement. It was a huge deal. And they reached out to me because I’m a thought leader in that space, they trusted me right from the get go. They wanted my input and they wanted to do business as a result. So that’s a huge opportunity for reps out there.

I challenge salespeople to take 2 hours per week for the next 2 months that you would have been prospecting, and blog. Or go to Twitter and Retweet some stuff, or go in a LinkedIn group and participate in conversation, or go find a blog where your prospects are hanging out and put a smart comment in there.

You know a lot. You are a thought leader in your space because you’re answering the objections and helping prospects every day with your value proposition. After those couple months, reflect back and ask yourself, “Were those 2 hours you spent blogging and interacting on social media been better spent prospecting or did you get enough value from that effort?”

So that’s another area that salespeople can really take advantage of, diversifying the way they’re investing time from the typical prospecting, qualifying and closing, to investing in themselves and their brand as a thought leader in the space.

Uzi: Yes, and it is fascinating because we’re talking a lot also about transparency. It is something that, again, going back to software, 15 years ago when somebody wanted to buy software, pretty much the only option was to go and buy a Gartner report and just pay whatever amount of money they had to buy the report and pick the number one option, because why would you choose any other option?

But today for example, we have ratings in the mobile app stores, and we have real people using the applications that are saying, “I like it,” or “I hate it.” Suddenly, you’re not relying on paid reports, you’re relying on the users of the application who are using it on a daily basis.

Jeff Bezos said something like, “You shouldn’t bet against transparency, because you’re just bound to lose.”

We always fantasize about the world in which the best product wins, that makes our lives so much easier. That’s a really interesting point. Tell me about another big thing that’s happening on the market that everybody’s talking about – the idea of big data. It’s a huge buzzword, and the question is: what’s in it for sales?

Mark: It’s critical, especially with a company like HubSpot where we’re making a thousand calls a day plus. Any small optimization you can make in that process has a huge impact on the business, and we thought about this stuff from day one. I’m hoping that in the next few years we see a lot of commercialization in this stuff that was really hard for us to do. I wrote a blog post on this particular study that we did years ago. We were always curious, like: if I got a lead today, I know I should call right away, but when should I call  again? Like do I try it tomorrow, or a week from now, or two weeks, and then – how many times should I try it before I give up? And as a sales leader, should I give salesperson one lead a month and have them call that lead a thousand times, or should I give a salesperson a thousand leads a month and have them call once? Obviously, neither of those are right, where in between is the right answer? And these are really important questions, even when there are 4 or 5 people that we wanted to nail.

So you can study that stuff and really start to understand the signs and the optimal signs around your particular prospect and sequences. I’ve seen some companies start to commercialize. We started to commercialize. Has anyone used Signals before? At getsignals.com, you can grab our free app of something we’ve used internally to know when people open up our emails. We started to commercialize that and I’m excited to see a lot of companies out there making it a lot easier than having to hire (MTPH) (aggression analysis) to figure this stuff out.

I’m about to call a company, I bet you if I ran a survey to sales people about what they know about that company, they’d have 1% of it covered of what they should know. They might have gone to the website and know the role of the person, they don’t know if the person’s ever been to their company’s website before, they don’t know which pages they’ve viewed, they don’t know if the marketing team’s even sent them automated emails before, they don’t know which ones were clicked on and which ones were opened, they don’t know if this person’s following them on social media, they don’t know if they’ve ever come on their blog enough to comment. These are all enormous signs for that person is to be like: “What are they interested and what’s their context?” It’s not that hard to get this stuff. So, a lot of improvement areas for sales.

You can watch the interview in its entirety here:

In part 3 of the interview, we open up questioning for Mark to the audience. Stay tuned!

Make sure you subscribe to the Base blog so you don’t miss it.

*This article originally appeared on the Base blog.

Lead scoring is typically one of the first items an organization wants to implement when purchasing a marketing automation suite. However, lead scoring is much more than a tool. It can serve as the life-blood between your sales and marketing organizations.

Having worked with dozens of marketing teams, I’ve consistently found that marketing complains that sales does not follow up on their leads, and sales complains that marketing’s leads are of poor quality. This dynamic can cause a rift between the departments and lead to a lack of trust when lead scoring is not executed properly. Ask yourself these questions…

• How do I gain sales buy-in?
• How do I deliver quality MQLs (marketing qualified leads)?
• How do I keep my scoring model up to date?

Over my 10+ years working with marketing organizations, I’ve identified these 4 Keys to Creating and Maintaining a Sound Lead Scoring Model:

1. Have a Plan

This sounds elementary, but creating a long-term strategy with milestones will put your organization in the best position to succeed. Document goals such as MQLs, SALs (sales accepted leads), sales pipeline and won deals. You only have one chance for a first impression, so don’t ruin your opportunity by launching a model that has not been well thought through.

2. Attain Sales Buy-in

This is the most critical component of creating a lead scoring model and I’ve yet to see a model be truly effective without sales buy-in. Gather key marketing members and a small group of successful sales members with whom you have a strong relationship and utilize their expertise and experiences to build the foundation of the model. Come to the discussion prepared with content examples and demographic information that you think they will find meaningful, but be sure to validate each item with sales and open the floor to discuss which combination of activities truly mean a buying signal. This can scare off many sales teams, so map out your lead management process and consider an SLA (service level agreement) to ensure MQLs are followed up in a timely manner.

3. Content is King

You can have a pristine model in place, but you’ve also got to have the content to drive activity. Think of content as the fuel for your Revenue Marketing™ vehicle. This isn’t to say that your content must be perfect prior to launching your lead scoring model. However, it will be difficult to create a repeatable, predictable and scalable program without it. Map your content to your prospect and customer pain points in a fashion that can be quickly and easily consumed.

4. Iteration, iteration, iteration

Now that you’ve met with Sales, vetted the model, built, tested and launched, you can move on to your next project, right? Wrong. The work has just begun. Many factors can influence your model, including industry shifts, organization focus, solution strengths, and government standards. Meet with a couple sales members one to two weeks after launch, gather their feedback and make necessary updates to the model. After this initial session, I find that a quarterly review with a few key sales members is effective.

A sound lead scoring model is a key component for marketing to transition from cost center to revenue center.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to state that social collaboration tools do not help with office productivity.

The current generation of white-collar workers did not exist in the pre-Internet age, so not using social tools to collaborate seems counter-intuitive. It’s like telling someone in the Iron Age to still use bronze simply because it’s “what they are used to,” despite the fact that iron is far superior in strength.

This infographic comes from a broad Microsoft study conducted across 31 countries and just under 10,000 “information workers.” It’s very interesting to see the statistics don't differ drastically between ages or genders, but it is curious that despite this evidence, the adoption of social collaboration tools in the workplace is still below 20%.

Amazingly (to me), most people still rely on email as the primary method of communicating, collaborating and sharing. Some apps aim to improve email usage—such as Mailbox for IOS, Sanebox for the Web and K-9 for Android—but they aren't really efficient unless you receive fewer than 10 emails a day. Answering or eliminating your email inbox has become some type of dark office humour—you’re trying? Ha!

Email is not the fabulous work tool it was in the 1990s. Everyone and anyone can email you now. And only you can sort through it.

No one wants to be responsible for breaking a chain of communication by simply not pressing “CC” or “reply to all.” It’s great that Gmail now checks for attachments if you mention them in your email's body text—saving everyone from the mortifying failure of a red-faced follow-up email. But for the most part, email is our communication dumping ground. And it’s not enough.

Hootsuite has made a video detailing the extent to which using social tools brings value to the enterprise. Business is about relationships, after all, so it makes sense to use social tools in a workplace environment. However, our damaged trust in social media as a personal tool has damaged the reputation of social collaboration tools for business—before their potential has truly been explored.

Harvard Business Review estimated in 2012 that workers who rely on interactions can expect a 20-25% increase in productivity if they use collaboration tools. Social collaboration generally speeds up many of the little things that slow us down in the workplace, such as getting permission to go ahead with a task and asking quick questions (and having the answers recorded for reference later), but it also provides a real-time overview of the activity of the company as a whole, enabling people to visualize the entire enterprise, not just what's within their primary sensory capabilities.

Personal vs. Enterprise Social Media

Sarah Kessler's attempts to delete her Facebook account depicts a kind of sad reality for social media: Many platforms can leave a bad taste in your mouth if you try to break up with them.

Social media users are less concerned about losing privacy—many millennials simply accept that the Internet has made it impossible to hide oneself completely—but controlling what data is collected and used is a high concern. Long-winded and complicated legal statements, like the ones on YouTube, encourage uncertainty. Most people will never read them and get screwed in the future, or will be “smart” about it and never sign up. On top of that, every new platform that uses social logins asks permission to access your data, and pulls the trick of highlighting the “yes” rather than the “skip” button to “post on your behalf” (how kind).

Simply put, not knowing who can see your data is what makes makes people wary of using social media.

Ironically, over 80% of employees use unauthorized apps at work. It seems that once the individual has moved from personal mode to work mode, these concerns fly out the window.

Security still remains the biggest threat to any size business adopting social collaboration in the cloud. But what's weird is that just 17% of companies say they have fully integrated social collaboration into their business, even though three-quarters have a dedicated social media team. Clearly, there is a lack of understanding on both the employee and employer side of how to handle our impulses—and our fears—to use social media as a tool to make working easier.

Choosing The Right Social Collaboration Tools

Social collaboration tools for the enterprise will go ahead regardless in 2014. But will it be done right?

Social tools for business is a top priority for 2014, according to this McAfee report, which also says the cloud will make it "relatively easy for employees to acquire and deploy SaaS applications without involving the IT department." This is good news for the many software-as-a-service (SaaS) collaboration solutions out there.

Security matters need to be understood by the average department/team/project manager since the IT experts will be removed little-by-little from the decision process. I’d say this forced learning can only be a good thing. After all, how much thought was really put into securing your enterprise email?

If cloud collaboration solutions are right for your team, you need to find out which specific tool is right for you. Be aware of is how your team works together on a daily basis. The solution you choose should fit smoothly onto their current processes and habits. It should be low friction and enable how they were already working. Trying to impose a tool that functions differently to your team’s natural workflow and communication habits will mean low adoption and eventual abandonment. Researching this will help you make an informed decision, which should lead to greater success at having others adopt the tool.

“We forget at our peril that collaboration is a fundamentally human activity," said Dion Hinchcliffe, chief strategy officer at Dachis Group. "This implies that any use of enabling technology without taking into account how people actually conduct their work, their inclinations to share information and interact with each other, and in particular how the proposed technology will empower them and alter their collaborative behavior for the better/worse, is bound to disappoint.”

If you can show your team members that their interactions and data are secure, you'll have a better chance of selling the idea of social collaboration tools to your enterprise. Increasing knowledge about security in the company will ease managers' worries, too. There is great potential to be harnessed by switching to a collaboration tool solution—the stats prove it and our personal methods and tools for interaction prove it. We are social animals, after all.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock 

One of the most powerful impacts of social media is the way has democratized brands. No longer is the brand, or corporate image, tightly controlled by a few senior executives, marketing communications specialists, and PR spokespersons. Every stakeholder in an enterprise—every customer, prospective customer, supplier, channel partner, employee, industry blogger, shareholder—has a voice. Those voices collectively shape the brand.

This reality can be scary as hell for brands, but it also creates new opportunities. Treating customers well produces an army of advocates, with far greater credibility and at far lower cost than traditional advertising. Invite bloggers to your company events, give them a peak “under the hood,” and the collective “media coverage” generated can be tremendous.

The most natural and knowledgeable group of brand ambassadors would seem though to be employees. They know the company’s products, people, policies and procedures from the inside. They (presumably) want the company to do well, as their livelihoods depend on its success. Those on the front lines, in areas like consulting and customer support, have a unique perspective and level of credibility. And collectively, particularly in large organizations, they can be a powerful amplifier of brand messages and values.

Yet companies big and small have struggled to capitalize on this potential. Asking employees to use social platforms on a brand’s behalf can easily feel awkward, or forced. Employees may not want to talk about the company on social media, or may not know how, or may want to expose too much, or may even use it in ways that damage the brand.

Of course, most organizations of any size now have social media policies in place; but these often only set the basic ground rules for discussing the company in social media (e.g., don’t discuss financial details, don’t disclose customer data, don’t talk about products in development). They don’t turn employees into effective and impactful brand advocates any more than merely knowing the traffic laws makes one an expert driver.

Into this milieu have stepped Cheryl and Mark Burgess with their book, The Social Employee: Success Lessons from IBM, AT&T, Dell, and Cisco on Building a Social Culture. A must-read for any executive or manager who wants to understand how to unleash the social power of a properly trained, motivated and incentivized workforce, this book goes far beyond the do’s and don’ts of social media policy. The authors have gone inside some of the most respected brands to discover and reveal how these companies have made social media work by enabling and empowering their employees.

In today’s social online world, the linear model of brand engagement (awareness, interest, desire, action) is obsolete. Rather than being the end goal, the sale is often the beginning of the true relationship between customers and brands. It isn’t just the product that matters, but the entire customer experience with the product, with post-sale support, even with a company’s values, that shape the brand image in the social realm.

To introduce their concept of a non-linear model of customer engagement, the authors invoke the image of a Möbius strip: a geometric shape that is “somewhat unique in the physical world. While the Möbius strip appears to be a closed band like a bracelet, because of a twist in the band itself the object technically has only one side—although it appears to have two…

“We like the metaphor implied in this famous mathematical conundrum: here is an object that is easy to understand by experiencing it, but incredibly difficult to produce through attempts to quantify it. Such a riddle creates an unmistakable parallel with the nature of social employee engagement. Any brand can see the value of social of social collaboration once they’ve jumped into the fray, but it’s much more challenging to try to define the precise formula for why it works…Each of us behaves as an employee, brand, and customer—sometimes simultaneously—throughout the course of a single day.”

Later in the book’s opening section, the authors quote a McKinsey Quarterly article which argues that “senior leaders can harness social media to shape consumer decision making in a predictable way…(social media) is much more than simply another form of paid marketing, and it demands more too: a clear framework to help CEOs and other top executives evaluate investments in it, a plan for building support infrastructure, and performance management systems to help leaders smartly scale their social presence. Companies that have these three elements in place can create critical new brand assets (such as content from customers or insights from their feedback), open up new channels for interactions (Twitter-based customer service, Facebook news feeds), and completely reposition a brand through the way its employees interact with customers or other parties.”

Social media is fundamentally changing the nature of marketing, and employees are crucial to successfully navigating this transition. In the sections titled Employees Already Own Your Brand and Marketing is Everyone’s Job, the authors contend that “strong Business-to-Business (B2) or Business-to-Consumer (B2C) communication outside of the brand’s walls begins with strong internal employee collaboration…Because of the many new demands that social media has created for internal organization as well as B2B and B2C interactions, brands are quickly coming to the realization that the act of marketing is no longer just the responsibility of the marketing department…This isn’t to say that each member of each department has to be on the frontlines of branding, just that everybody should have a role in spreading the brand’s message.

“The only thing preventing organizations from connecting employees with the necessary information and resources to drive real change is the willingness to develop a proper infrastructure…Many companies simply don’t know how to handle the changes in the work styles and attitudes that are emerging within the workforce.”

And that is what sets up the core of this book: lessons the authors share from seven leading companies in how to harness the power of social employees. Among them:

• • IBM: let employees develop the company’s social media guidelines. “In trying to determine the best way to address questions regarding the proper protocols of a social business, IBM struck on a novel idea: rather than confining a small group of people to a conference room to hammer out social policy, why not take the question to the people? IBM quickly set up an open wiki accessible to the entire network that would allow IBMers to establish their own computing guidelines…The results of the wiki experiment were quickly adapted as the company’s official social media guidelines. According to (IBM executive Ethan) McCarty, everything is still holding up quite well. ‘IBMers treat it like their Magna Carta’…The guidelines, which McCarty affectionately refers to as IBM’s social media Woodstock, have become so renowned in the business world that hundreds of other organizations have contacted IBM seeking permission to adopt them as their own.”
• • Adobe: promote social media policies and best practices as “guiderails” for employees, not straightjackets. Adobe’s Corporate Social Media team knows it can’t control or dictate every social media interaction, so it has instead “adopted a policy of `influence without authority’ in order to spread the brand’s social message…Larger brands simply don’t have the resources to micromanage social adoption practices for an entire enterprise. `We had little to no authority over (other internal) teams to mandate change,” (Senior Director of Social Media and Public Relations Maria) Poveromo said. ‘So instead, we had to learn ways to encourage these stakeholders to see the value of working together.’”
• • Dell: use tools and structure to monitor and address the torrent of social media activity happening outside the brand’s direct sphere of influence. “Listening to over 25,000 conversations daily produced a wealth of data, but the brand has had to be creative in how it sorts and utilizes this information. In 2010, Dell established the Social Media Listening Command Center (SMLCC) Led by Maribel Sierra. The brand has since designed over 300 monitoring categories in order to aggregate information by product line, customer segments, and various business functions. The SMLCC is able to sort data by criteria such as location/geography, basic demographics, reach, sentiment, subject matter, and social platform. To accomplish this kind of sorting, the SMLCC team uses Saleforce’s Radian6 technology to assess and report on the trending social media topics related to Dell.”

There’s much more, from Cisco (representing leader authentically builds tremendous credibility); Southwest Airlines (founder Herb Kelleher: “If the employee comes first, then they’re happy…A motivated employee treats the customer well”); AT&T (use social media to humanize the brand: “A fundamental trait of the social age is the fact that people expect information to come from a trusted resource with a human face”); and Acxiom (create a social employee “PACT”—short for passion, accountability, creativity and teamwork).

While the book showcases examples and practices from large organizations, many of the lessons are applicable to companies of any size—such as the importance of executive involvement on social platforms on behalf of the brand.

I’m thrilled and honored to have worked with Cheryl Burgess for the past three years honoring the #Nifty50 top women and men on Twitter. Cheryl and Mark have written an outstanding book for any leader seeking a roadmap to building and optimizing employee engagement on behalf of the brand in social media. As legendary management guru Tom Peters said of the book, “Social media is wasted without social employees…my social business favorite books #1: The Social Employee.”

Yes, campers, March 4 is National Grammar Day, established in 2008 by Martha Brockenbrough, founder of the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar (SPOGG) and author of Things That Make Us [Sic] (extra geek points to everyone who gets the pun in that title).

If you’ve hung around this blog or our podcast for a while, you’ll know that I’m big on getting grammar right. And I’m not the only one. Good grammar does make a difference, and what seem to many to be “nitpicky” details really can make or break you as a thought leader … which is what we content marketers are after, right?

So here’s my gift to you on this day: 10 tips to keep your content on the high road. Enjoy!

1. An apostrophe (‘) is used for one of two purposes: (a) to show possession (“Sophie’s delicious rawhide bone”) or (b) in a contraction (a grammatical mashup of a noun and a verb, as in ”that’s” in place of “that is”). That’s it. No sneaking them into plurals (“try our delicious cake’s”).
2. Not all spelling mistakes will be picked up by your spell-checker. Proofread, proofread, proofread!
3. Avoid comma splices (“I looked for John, he wasn’t there”). If you need to join two independent clauses (clauses that could each stand alone as a sentence), insert ”and” or a semicolon (;). A comma won’t cut it here.
4. “Their,” “they’re,” and ”there” are not interchangeable. Get ‘em straight.
5. Ditto for “your” and “you’re.”
6. Ditto again for “its” and “it’s.”
7. And again for “peek,” “peak,” and “pique.”
8. “Affect” is a verb; “effect” is (in most cases) a noun.
9. Something is “different from” (not “different than”) something else.
10. “[person's name] and I” or “[person's name] and me?” It depends on the phrase’s role in the sentence.
    • Use “… and I” if it’s the subject (“Adam and I are going to the
      conference”).
    • Use  “… and me” if it’s a direct object or object of a preposition (“Please email that to Robert and me”).

OK, folks, your turn: what are your top tips for becoming a grammar ninja? Share them with us in the Comments!

Telus’ health unit is expanding its reach with the acquisition of Kelowna-based Med Access Inc., a company that provides online health records to 2,000 physicians in five provinces. The purchase is the latest in an expansion that comes just over a year after Telus Health, a division of telecommunications giant Telus Corp., doubled its reach among Canadian doctors by buying Ontario’s largest electronic medical records (EMR) company.

Having a detailed understanding of your ideal customer is a key starting point for a truly comprehensive marketing strategy. To gain this insight, initiate a buyer persona exercise with all the key stakeholders from sales, marketing, support, product management, operations, development, etc. Broader input will yield more detailed insight into these personas. It is important to the success of this exercise to have senior executive buy in and participation.

This is not a new concept, yet this is so often glossed over or completely overlooked. It is important to eliminate assumptions about the buyers and really understand why buyers choose the solutions they do. You also need to understand what answers they are looking for and how your buyer defines success. To find this information, interview recent buyers to understand what they were up against when they made the buying decision, what were their decision criteria at every stage of the buying process, who else was involved in the buying process, and how the buyer finally arrived at the decision. Basically you need to develop in-depth expertise about your buyers in order to successfully market to them.

There are many resources available to help with this exercise, but I would start with Adele Revella’s website Buyer Persona as she offers some excellent resources to get this process started. Sirius Decisions is another excellent resource, as they have also written specifically on the B2B aspects the buyer persona and provide detailed guidance on how best to complete the exercise.

Once the research on the buyer personas is complete, the logical next step is some additional research into the goals of the company, not just revenue goals, but the long-term vision and strategic plan for the company. The ideal approach is to conduct internal interviews with all executives and key stakeholders within the company, what has been effective and less effective, and their long-term assumptions. It is often worthwhile to hold a session offsite with an outside consultant to discuss the findings of the discovery process and begin to layout
the longer term vision and strategic plan.

The ideal outcome of this process is to define a plan and vision for the company for the next few years that would include where the company wants to be from a revenue perspective, how the company wants to be perceived in the market, and who makes up the company’s target market, as well as what solutions they will offer and who they may partner with to get there. The process also should cover determining the ideal sales model and channel strategy (if appropriate) to achieve these goals.

The most important part of this process is to ensure that there is a plan in place for the key stakeholders to know which initiatives they own, a clear set of metrics to measure success, and a timeline for execution and delivery. As the definition of the plan and vision can be very time consuming, make sure that there is enough time set aside for the execution and delivery planning and that every initiative has a clear owner, timeline, and agreed upon set of metrics. Set up quarterly meetings to follow up on the progress compared to the metrics set forth and to tweak the goals as required to allow for shifts in the market.

This blog post is an excerpt from the eBook Marketers Making a Difference: Volume 3 about creating a comprehensive B2B marketing strategy. 

NEW YORK, N.Y. – Ellen DeGeneres’ celeb-studded selfie from the most-watched Oscars telecast in a decade was a landmark social media moment at a time online conversation is boosting television viewership and vice versa.

It’s also a murky example of what is or isn’t product placement in a hyper-marketed world. Would the world’s most retweeted photo have been shot by an iPhone if Samsung hadn’t been a commercial sponsor of the Academy Awards?

An estimated 43 million people watched “12 Years a Slave” win the Oscar for best picture on Sunday night. It was the most-watched Academy Awards since 2004, when “Lord of the Rings: Return of the King” was the best picture. And it was the most popular entertainment event on TV since the “Friends” finale that year. The Oscars are generally the most-watched TV event of the year after the Super Bowl.

Oscar night was also big for Jimmy Kimmel. The ABC late-night star drew just under 7 million viewers for his post-Oscars special, the biggest audience he’s ever gotten on ABC, despite starting at 12:42 a.m. on the East Coast.

The ratings provide further evidence of how big event programming is a growth engine for broadcast networks, in large part because of fans watching the event and conversing with friends on tablets and smartphones. Twitter said that some 14.7 million tweets mentioning the Oscars or prominent actors and films were sent out during the Sunday night telecast, and Facebook said there were 25.4 million interactions about the show.

Social media was clearly a driving force Sunday and is why live events on networks “have become basically the currency,” co-producer Neil Meron told The Associated Press.

“What it’s all about right now is creating a conversation, and social media allows for the conversation as it’s happening,” he said.

No social media moment was bigger than when host DeGeneres briefly caused Twitter to crash after going into the audience and asking Bradley Cooper to take a picture with several other stars crowding around. Besides Cooper and DeGeneres, Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, Kevin Spacey, Julia Roberts, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt also crowded into the frame. She asked viewers to help her set a retweet record, and they quickly complied.

By Monday afternoon, it had been retweeted some 2.8 million times, shattering the previous record of 810,000 retweets for the photo of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama hugging after the 2012 election. Twitter was humming at 254,644 tweets per minute after DeGeneres’ request, and the company said the crush disrupted service for 20 minutes.

DeGeneres handed a Samsung device to Cooper to take the selfie. Since the Oscars host’s Twitter posts from backstage included shots from an iPhone, Samsung doesn’t seem to be her usual smartphone of choice.

Samsung, however, was a big presence at the Oscars besides being a commercial sponsor. The company gave its phones to student presenters and encouraged them to tweet and post on Instagram with them. Dozens of Samsung phones, tablets and TVs were used to make a digital photo display in the backstage green room.

ABC said Samsung did not pay specifically for use of the camera in DeGeneres’ selfie segment and the company wasn’t explicitly named on the air as the stunt unfolded, but it is a noticeably larger device than an iPhone. Spokeswoman Nicole Marostica said once producers decided to do the segment, it made more sense to use a Samsung product because the company was an Oscars sponsor.

“They were just lucky beneficiaries of the whole thing,” Marostica said.

Samsung said Monday that it was donating $1.5 million each to DeGeneres’ favourite charities, St. Jude’s and the Humane Society. The company, in a statement, did not directly address its role in seeing that its phone got the starring role.

“Ellen was given a choice of what she wanted to do,” said Oscars co-producer Craig Zadan. “One moment she wanted to do the iPhone, the next moment the Samsung. I think it was nothing except it was an arbitrary last-minute decision, let’s go with the Samsung. Believe me, everything was given a lot of thought. The telephone was not given any thought.”

Even more spontaneous was that galaxy of stars surrounding Ellen in the selfie shot. It was just supposed to be Streep, Zadan said. “I don’t think that Ellen even knew that all of those other stars would get out of their seats and jump in and be in the picture,” he said.

Use of the Samsung phone “is a wonderful example of product placement,” said Tim Calkins, marketing professor at the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern University.

“It worked because it’s not a formal placement,” Calkins said. “The best product placements seem natural and this seemed natural.”

Samsung is the worldwide leader in smartphones but trails Apple in the United States, and the company has been aggressively going after the U.S. market.

Oddly, the audience snapshot wasn’t a new element for DeGeneres. When she hosted the Oscars in 2007, she went into the audience and asked filmmaker Steven Spielberg to snap a picture of her with Clint Eastwood, saying she wanted to use it on Myspace.

Twitter said that most tweeted-about star on Oscar night was Jennifer Lawrence, with Brad Pitt coming in second. “Gravity” was the movie that was the subject of the most tweets during the show, followed by “Frozen.”

A total of 11.3 million people commented on the award via Facebook, the company said. The busiest commenters were women aged 18 to 34, Facebook said, and the one moment that drew the most attention was when “12 Years a Slave” won the award for best picture.

Jared Leto had his TiVo moment Sunday night. The company said the clip of Leto’s acting in “Dallas Buyers Club” was a moment when viewers paused their digital video recorders and rewound to see something again more than at any other point in the show.

____

Associated Press writers Sandy Cohen in Los Angeles and Bree Fowler in New York contributed to this report.

___

David Bauder can be reached at dbauder@ap.org or on Twitter@dbauder. His work can be found at http://bigstory.ap.org/content/david-bauder

The post Ellen’s Oscar celeb selfie: Was it a shrewd product placement in hyper-marketed world? appeared first on Canadian Business.

If we’ve heard it once, we’ve heard it a thousand times: the user experience is one of the most integral elements of an eCommerce site. And while this mantra is essential when developing an online store, the problem with the ever-repeated declaration is that there are so many elements that make up a good user experience. Take for example the differing characteristics of a B2C site and a B2B site. They are reason enough to go beyond blanketed statements and start pinpointing the wants and needs of a specific business’s demographic.

For businesses with a B2B contingency, there is nothing more frustrating for their customers than to make them manually enter order information into their procurement system. Although repeat orders can be automatically scheduled, changing a pre-existing order or introducing new SKUs can be time consuming and can also open up the door for human error.

To improve the user experience for B2B businesses, punchouts can be an incredibly valuable tool. Giving the most basic definition, punchouts are the link between a buyer’s procurement system and a seller’s eCommerce site. They allow a buyer access to third-party online catalogs by “punching-out” from their procurement system to the supplier website for the requisition of products.

Unlike a B2C experience, buyers don’t make the final purchase on a seller’s site. With punchouts, they instead transfer the shopping cart and its contents back to the procurement system for processing and fulfillment. With this model, purchasing managers can take advantage of the user experience a seller injected into his or her full website. Taking it to the next level, a seller can also create microsites designed with specific customers in mind.

By punching-out of a procurement system and into a microsite that contains a product catalog tailored just for them, customers will find what they need quickly and easily instead of wading through an entire site. They’ll also find previously negotiated pricing that eliminates the need to make manual calculations.

Therefore, when creating microsites, a seller can drill down on a very specific demographic and then develop a user experience just for them. Compared to the old way of doing things, using a punchout system has drastically improved the method for B2B procurement.

To get a feel for how the punchout system works, here’s a quick run down: A buyer selects a supplier within the procurement system and is then pulled into login screen. Once the proper credentials are inserted, a new window opens where the customer can start browsing through his or her custom catalog. When the buyer is ready to check out, the content in his or her cart is converted into a purchase order and sent to the procurement system for approval. Once approved, the order request is sent to the vendor.

Although the process for procurement sounds fairly straightforward, setting up punchouts isn’t always as simple. To get assistance with that task or with creating microsites, contact the team at NetSphere Strategies to schedule a consultation. We’d be happy to help.

The term “content marketing” is used to refer to a lot of things, from blog posts to infographics to social media. However, although lots of businesses are now churning out content, not all businesses are confident that their content marketing is leading to measurable positive results. How should businesses define content marketing success? How should they use content marketing to boost their bottom line? We’ll answer these questions in the post below.

Start with a Strategy

Does your business have a written content marketing strategy? If you don’t have a written strategy, it’s going to be very hard to know when you are hitting your goals and when you’re not. Therefore, your first step should be to sit down with your marketing team and devise a written content marketing strategy that includes measurable goals. Here are some questions you should ask in order to develop your strategy:

1. What do we want to accomplish with our content marketing?

On one hand, this question seems relatively easy to answer: You want your content marketing to lead to more revenue. However, try to answer this question in a more nuanced way. For example, one way to answer this question is, “We want to build an online community of fans and followers who are actively engaging in our brand,” or “We want to increase social media-to-sales conversion rates by X percent.” The more specific you can be when you answer this question, the more measurable your results will be.

2. What does our average customer’s buying cycle look like?

How does your customer go from being someone who has never heard of your brand to being someone who actively consumes your product and advocates your product to others? In order to design content that moves your customer from point A to point B to point C in the buying cycle, you first need to understand what that buying cycle looks like.

In general, the average buying cycle can be described in these stages:

• Brand awareness
• Brand engagement or interest
• Trial
• First purchase
• Repeat purchase
• Brand advocate

3. Why do customers identify with our brand?

Inbound and content marketing works best when your prospects and customers identify with the story of your brand. They consider your brand and themselves members of the same “tribe.” So what is that tribe? What is your brand’s story? Why do your current customers identify with that story? Answering this question has less to do with describing what you do than knowing who you are. When you are able to answer this question concisely, you’ll also know what kind of content marketing will resonate with your fans.

4. Who are our customers and what do they need?

It is very useful to find out as much as you can about your customers. Where do they live? Are they male or female? How old are they? What music do they listen to? Who are their favorite movie stars? What do they do on the weekends? Thanks to social media and clever tools like Facebook’s Graph Search, you can learn a lot about your customers quite easily. When you know more about them, you’ll be able to make content that appeals to them.

Furthermore, once you understand who your customer is, you also need to understand what problems they face or needs they have. This isn’t why they need you in particular, but more of a general inquiry about what common problems they face and what other solutions besides your brand they are investigating.

5. Which channels do we want to focus on?

Even if you wanted to have a presence on every social media channel there is, it wouldn’t be realistic. You’re better off with a well-thought-out presence on 5 to 10 social media channels and blogs than a haphazard presence on 20 channels. Pick the channels where your target audience is most likely to be.

6. How will our content change from channel to channel?

Your content marketers need to understand how each content marketing channel differs. For example, the post that works well on LinkedIn probably won’t play out in exactly the same way as it would on Facebook.

Once You Put Your Strategy in Place, Measure Your Results

Once you know who you’re marketing to, how you’re going to do it, where you’re going to do it, and what your customer’s buying cycle looks like, you’ll be able to create content that speaks directly to your written goals and strategy.

However, even though the steps of writing out a strategy and creating content that meets the strategy’s goals are very important, your job still isn’t finished. Your next step is to measure the kinds of results you’re getting and adjust your content creation process according to the data you’re seeing.

1. Start by defining your metrics for success at each stage of the buying cycle.

Here’s where really understanding your customers’ buying cycle becomes important. What you measure will depend upon what a “win” is for each part of the buying cycle. For example, some businesses only want to measure sales conversions. However, when it comes to brand awareness, a sales conversion is not the right measurement. Also when it comes to brand engagement, a sales conversion is not the right measurement. Here’s what you want to measure:

• For brand awareness and engagement, monitor:
  • The number of followers or fans in any given channel
  • Comments, likes, and shares
  • Online chatter about the brand
• To measure the trial or consideration phase, monitor the conversion rates of squeeze pages (i.e., “Sign up to receive our free white paper”)
• To measure first purchases, monitor sales conversion rates, but only from content designed to make the sale (i.e., when you send an email that has a “Buy Now” button, divide how many people actually made the purchase by how many people opened the email)
• To measure repeat purchases, track what happens to first-time buyers after the initial purchase
• To measure brand advocacy, monitor:
• • Social shares
  • Email forwards
  • User-generated content
  • User reviews
  • Online chatter about the brand

2. Put the right tools in place to measure the results.

How do you track all the data above? You need to right tools. I’d suggest Google Analytics and Levisto’s content marketing analytics software for WordPress. Google Analytics is great for all websites because it allows you to track many of the metrics mentioned above, but it’s missing some valuable content marketing metrics. Levisto, a new company whose WordPress tools are currently in beta, provide analytics that are specifically important for content marketers in one centralized view. For example, in one window, you’ll be able to see which blog posts were the most shares and comments, what your most popular word lengths are, and what time of day you should be posting.

3. Tweak your content accordingly.

Armed with your strategy, which defines your goals, and your data, which measures how well you’re achieving those goals, you’ll be ready to make content that’s based upon a foundation of solid data rather than upon a foundation of guesswork. For example, “use humor” is one of the common refrains of many content marketing experts, but your data might reveal that all your attempts at humor have fallen flat, whereas your serious white papers are hugely popular. You won’t know to make more white papers and crack fewer jokes, however, if you’re not measuring your results.

Conclusion

To sum it all up, you won’t know if your content marketing is successful or unsuccessful if you’re “flying blind,” without a written strategy and without carefully monitoring your data. Get a written strategy in place, define what metrics you’re going to monitor, get the right tools to do that monitoring, and then make content based on your data. This kind of content marketing approach will give everyone in your company confidence in the marketing department’s efforts.

Emotions have a powerful influence on decision-making and behavior.  When you leverage the power emotion, you can create more engaging content and connect with your audience in a real way.  Content marketing is becoming increasingly competitive, and brands are using everything in their arsenals to outdo their competitors.  Although content must have a strong emotional impact in order to go viral, some types of emotions yield better results than others.  However, both positive as well as negative emotions can amplify the reach of your content.  If your branding and marketing are not emotionally savvy, it is high time that you raise their emotional IQs.

Use active storytelling to promote engagement, and do not be shy about your opinions.  A strong viewpoint is far more interesting than an uncertain one, which fails to express your true thoughts out of a fear of offending those who may oppose your arguments.  Tap into the emotions of your audience.  Incite emotional responses of happiness, awe, anger or anxiety, which can all increase your the reach of your content across social media.

No matter what type of content you create, it needs to resonate and strike an emotional chord with your audience.  Emotional resonance makes content more memorable, more remarkable and more likely to be shared on social media.  According to research carried out by Kelsey Libert and Kristin Tynski of Frac.tl, the emotions most commonly found in a viral content outbreak include curiosity, amazement, interest, astonishment, uncertainty and admiration.

Leverage the Power of Emotions

The strongest or primary emotions are the ones most commonly used in marketing, including fear, guilt, pride, greed and love.

Fear

Fear is widely used in emotional marketing—often based on the stated consequences of not taking action.  Fear can create a sense of urgency and prompt a buying decision.

Guilt

While triggering feelings of guilt for inaction can be effective, another way is to provide a way of resolving guilt.  Imagine that you work long hours and are unable to take enough long walks with your much-loved dog.  An ad for a dog-walking service could offer a solution to resolve your guilt.

Pride

Marketing that leverages pride to prompt action aims to make the audience want to make a buying decision, because it will provide a measure of exclusivity or make the buyers feel special due to their purchase.  Marketing for an exclusive country club could use pride as an catalyst for action.

Greed

Marketing that offers to save you money or improve your business is appealing to greed.  Illustrate how you create value; prove your utility, which will help you leverage the power of greed.

Love

Love may be the most potent primary emotion.  HubSpot is a big proponent of creating marketing people love.  Be a lovable brand.  You know and understand your clients and prospects, so speak to their needs, offer solutions, and give them what they truly want.

The Emotions of Color

Color has a significant emotional impact, which can significantly influence your marketing.  The infographic below, created by The Logo Company, illustrates the effects of color choices used by major brands.  Consider whether you want to appear trustworthy, strong and dependable with blue or exciting, youthful and bold with red.  Be cognizant of the impact of color, when you chose images for your content or create your own visual media, such as infographics or webinars.  What emotions are you currently projecting with your website design?  What emotions does your latest content trigger?

In the article, 5 Reasons Why Your Business Proposal Sucks, I talked about what to avoid in your proposal. At this point, you might be asking yourself “what should be in a proposal?” First start by understanding that executives and buyers make decisions by asking, “Why do we need this?” or “What problem does this solve?” Next recognize that buyers are most comfortable with the vendor that best understands their situation and presents the greatest value.

A winning business proposal will help the client (1) gain comfort with you and your organization and (2) understand the value of your solution. Companies that see the value are more likely to pick your solution. Here are 4 steps to help you create a winning business proposal.

Step 1 – Explain that you understand what the client needs, and why it is important

In your proposal clearly demonstrate your understanding of not only the client’s stated challenge, but also the secondary impact to their organization of not solving the issue. A majority of your time and effort should be placed here. As the client reads your proposal, they might even recognize new, important reasons this issue needs to be solved. They won’t be wondering whether or not you “get it.”

For example, you might say it this way in your proposal, “From our discussion with your team, we recognize that the reason you are replacing this system is the frustration your customers face when they cannot get accurate information. We appreciate how this is impacting your brand reputation, and we will work closely with you to ensure your customers adore the new system and will want to tell their friends about it.”

Step 2 – Demonstrate how you have solved similar problems for others

Share stories in your proposal about how you solved challenges for organizations facing similar issues as your client. Even if you have not solved the identical issue at hand, illustrate how and why the client might find that another client’s predicament is similar enough to demonstrate where you delivered solid results. That said, be candid if you have never before delivered the exact solution you are proposing to your client. The client will find out and your honesty will build trust.

Do not make sensational, unsupported claims in your proposal about being the only people on the planet who could possibly solve the client’s issue. Identify any potential risks of achieving their goals, and your plan to avoid those challenges. You could explain it like this in your proposal, “Recently, another client of ours (XYZ Company) faced a similar challenge with their customer-facing systems. Visit this URL to see how their customers are now raving about their system. Though the functionality is not identical, you might find they had similar challenges.”

Step 3 – Talk about yourself very little, and the competition even less

In your proposal use your existing customer’s words to talk about you. For example: ”Our clients describe us as responsive, innovative, and reliable.” Nobody believes the vendor’s claims about themselves. But, your client’s words are credible. The reader gives those words almost as much weight as a 3rd party reference. It may seem like a subtle difference, but adding your client’s voice makes a positive difference.

Though you can certainly be conscious of the competition, never say anything negative about your competition (especially in a written proposal). Your client can say something negative about other vendors, and when they do, the only appropriate response is “It’s unfortunate that you’ve had that experience.” If you add fuel to the fire, you’ll only get caught in the mess.

Step 4 – Pricing and Timing

Your business proposal must directly connect your pricing (their investment) to the value the client will receive from your solution. In the book How Smart Companies Save Money, Jack Quarles explains that the goal of buying is Value. Value, is the difference between the benefit and the price. (Value = Benefit – Price).

Successful proposals portray a solution as an investment and clearly show what happens if the client DOESN’T solve the issue at hand. Michael Boyette shared in his article: Create sales proposals that will ‘knock their socks off’ your proposal should define a business case for your solution. Michael shares in Step 3 four pieces of the business case puzzle: illustrate the costs, benefits, timing, and financial impact of your solution. Remember it’s essential your proposal focuses on results, not resources. The customer wants to solve a problem, not buy hours or items.

Above all, get there early in the proposal process. In most cases, executives tell me they win fewer than 10% of the ‘Blind Bid’ opportunities. Comparatively, when they get to a deal early, they tell me they win more than 50% of the time. Jack Quarles confirms that eventually, buyers have a preferred vendor for whom they are rooting. If they are not rooting for you, rest assured they are rooting for someone else. (In the interest of full disclosure, Jack is also my co-author for Same Side Selling, which ships in early April)

If the customer was rooting for you before, they won’t be if you deliver a lousy proposal. Invest the time to deliver a quality proposal, and you’ll make their decision easy. Just be sure to always make it clear what’s in it for them, and demonstrate how you are sharply focused on their results.

It’s Your Turn

Where do you struggle with proposals? When on the receiving end, what catches your attention (in a good way – or a negative way)?

We’ve had a lot of fun tracking down great pieces of marketing collateral to share with you each week. The handy thing about picking great content marketing pieces is that often these pieces will come to you.

Such is the case with this week’s inclusion.  Sales Benchmark Index does a great deal of work looking at both sales and marketing leaders. Last week they published a helpful tool for marketers that addresses a major pain that product marketing and content marketing pros feel. And it deserves a hat tip for confronting it. Take a look at the Sales Enablement and Marketing Collaborator

The challenge is that marketing teams will often produce outstanding campaigns. The campaign could be in support of a new product rollout, a new geographic launch, or any other marketing initiative. Customers and prospects will speak to the sales team about the campaign. And if sales isn’t singing from the same hymnal, there’s going to be a lot of message confusion — and frustrated buyers.

Sales Benchmark Index decided to address this problem by breaking down the problem of syncing communications across sales and marketing when a new campaign is launched. They did so by producing a helpful task list that marketers can review each time they prepare a campaign.

The post The Greatest Piece of Marketing Content Ever this Week Award appeared first on KnowledgeTree.

Apple, the now-dominant force in enterprise, has been taking some serious heat in recent weeks over some major flaws in its security.

First there was the so-called "Gotofail" error that left traffic that should have been encrypted totally unsecure. 

Less than a week later, security firm FireEye revealed that it was possible to make a "keylogger" on iOS that can track what you're doing on your device and send that information to a remote server.

Perhaps to quell some of the fears of enterprise buyers (or the IT guys who have to support them), Apple released a new white paper (PDF) last week detailing the various security systems built into iOS, the operating system that powers the iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV product lines.

The most interesting bits to read in the otherwise dry security document are the parts detailing the workings of the iPhone 5s — the first device from Apple to combine iOS 7, the A7 system-on-a-chip, and the Touch ID fingerprint scanner.

Built into Apple's A7 — the chip famous for its 64-bit "desktop class" application processor — is a less well-known coprocessor called the Security Enclave. While it's not making video play smoother or music download faster, it is doing something that anyone can appreciate: letting you unlock your phone in a fraction of a second while keeping malicious hackers at bay.

The Security Enclave goes through a secure boot process independent of the rest of the chip and also goes through its own software updates. It's kept separate from the rest of the system, but comes in when anything secure needs to happen.

Unlocking your device with your thumb? Fingerprint data from the Touch ID sensor goes to the Security Enclave, where it is compared with data saved on the device. If it's a match, the device unlocks. Same thing with making purchases via iTunes or the App Store.

The actual processor never touches the data — it's all forwarded over an encrypted bus that only the Security Enclave can read. And after the Security Enclave deals with fingerprint data, it throws it out, too. The only thing left afterward is a set of data that can't be used to reconstruct an actual fingerprint and has no data connected to your identity.

Apple's document makes it clear that enterprise buyers (including government buyers, who can now buy the iPhone 5S thanks to its validated compliance with U.S. Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2 Level 1) need not fear buying and trusting the security behind Touch ID. But there's another use for Touch ID that could prove even more lucrative for Apple: payments.

As it stands, Apple doesn't give any third-party access to the Security Enclave or Touch ID. That stands in sharp contrast to Samsung, whose new Samsung Galaxy S5 now sports a fingerprint reader. Samsung is partnering with PayPal to facilitate mobile and Web-based payments with the swipe of a finger.

As Business Insider's Jim Edwards recently documented, it's becoming rather evident that Apple is going to open up Touch ID-controlled payments to third-party retailers as well. But Apple's payments solution won't rely on any third-party services — the payments themselves will be authorized and facilitated within the existing iTunes infrastructure, which Touch ID and the Security Enclave were literally designed for.

We don't know much about the security built into Samsung's latest flagship, but considering Android's poor history with security, it could be a deciding factor in what becomes the leading mobile payments platform.

SEE ALSO: Apple is already building its next massive business and no one seems to have noticed

Join the conversation about this story »

Market segmentation and customer insights are only part of what you need to enter the competitive market. You need to take your marketing to the next level. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Don’t let the title scare you. You’re probably thinking, “Is she crazy? The end of the landing page?” For the conversion optimization experts — people who have presumably staked the success of their careers upon the success of their landing pages — I’m staking my success on being able to convince you that “landing pages” can no longer be the basis for conversion conversations.

Just this past year, I had the pleasure of presenting an entire topic around getting more bang for your paid search buck through the use of optimized landing pages. In my presentation, and in most others at conferences across the country, we discussed the need for campaign-specific pages, dynamic content, segmentation, and reducing friction.

I acknowledge that in theory, these topics are still somewhat advanced and achieving them will be the 2014 goal of marketing teams around the world. In reality, these features are already outdated must haves and in realizing that, it becomes even more apparent how outdated even the idea of a “landing page” is.

The problem with landing pages, regardless of how hyper relevant and conversion focused they may be, is that your modern 2014 visitors don’t want to “land” anywhere. Having been inundated with smart designs and optimized forms, they’re now beginning to wise up and demand more. Like most things in life, we gave them an inch and they’re demanding a mile. In place of landing pages, we’re offering highly sophisticated, personalized, and engaging marketing apps.

Marketing apps are part of a new wave of digital marketing, one of deep engagement, interaction and utility. Content marketing overload is everywhere and it’s diluting efforts to the point that many are questioning its value. Marketing apps can transform your static content into a useful digital experience. Cut through the clutter — reduce bounce rates, improve engagement and increase conversion rates with useful content.

Put Your Landing Pages to Work

In order to provide value, and rise above the clutter, we can leverage tactics to significantly increase the usefulness of our digital experiences. The opportunity for the modern marketer lies not in generating more and more and more landing pages. The opportunity lies in putting those landing pages to work — making content more engaging, and more useful, for those who interact with it.

Now for the million dollar question: What, exactly, is a marketing app? Marketing apps leverage usefulness to turn static pages into applications that engage and convert your audience into leads and sales. It’s a form of utility that transforms content into something customers actually want to interact with because it’s useful, memorable and valuable.

So it’s time to get inspired. Inspired to ditch the static landing page and provide that higher value experience, reap more online leads and drive real engagement

There are countless varieties of marketing apps, but to get started, I’ve highlighted a few of my personal favorites.

Idea 1: Quiz

Quizzes are a great way to engage and educate, giving valuable insights and advice while marketers get high-value visitor profiling data. For quizzes to work, particularly from a conversion standpoint, they must offer rich information. For example, asking visitors multiple- choice questions in an assessment and subsequently giving participants written recommendations based on their series of answers.

Idea 2: Games!

Games are entertaining ways to engage, educate and convert prospects. For example, “Guess Which” games are great follow-on uses of survey data. Rather than answering survey questions for themselves, participants guess which answer was most popular amongst their peers. In answering, they are exposed to shared pains, problems and solutions that drive demand.  Simple guessing games provide another way to communicate strategically compelling information- for example, guessing how much time is saved, on average, by users of a solution.

Idea 3: Configurator

Configurators are specific types of wizards that allow participants to assemble or package products and/or services. By answering a series of self-evaluation questions, they can be presented with a more targeted and specific offering. This data can be used in marketing automation programs as well as in personal selling to cater messages and offers. This makes sales and marketing smarter, more likely to satisfy visitor expectations, and more likely to convert traffic into business.

Idea 4: Calculator

Most organizations have something that can be calculated using an engaging app-like experience. The most obvious example is pricing. Price “ball parking” lets you price-qualify leads without giving them personal pricing. It uses some basis axis upon which to assess and offer a price range or ball park. This provides the immediate gratification that B2B buyers crave while allowing sales to continue to build value prior to delivering a specific price quote.

User expectations are quickly evolving with regards to how they want to interact with brands, and with the information they are consuming.  An app-like experience is increasingly what your audience is conditioned to expect. It’s what they want.

Because of the explosion of mobile apps, and mobility in general, we’re used to interacting with our devices, inputting information on the screen and having it do something.

It’s not at all hard to see how these app-like experiences deliver much more than an opportunity to “land.” They provide a springboard for allowing visitors to deeply engage with your brand and product in a way that will convert more leads and generate more revenue.

What do you think? Will 2014 be the end of old cookie-cutter landing pages and the beginning of the marketing app takeover?

The Case for Marketing Apps

Want to learn more about marketing apps and how they can help improve your brand’s landing page experience?

Register to download our “Case for Marketing Apps” white paper!

What makes a website truly great? I mean so great that traffic is high and growing, bounce rates are low, and engagement and demand are off the charts.

Is it a beautiful, award-winning design? A killer SEO strategy? Its interactive, cutting-edge user experience? Or is it simply tied to the amount of monetary investment? The bigger the budget, the better the website, right?

For many enterprise companies, tens to hundreds to millions of dollars are poured into their website each year, on everything from design, content, media, SEO, promotion, and advertising, to hosting, infrastructure, and more. After all, a website is the Grand Central Station of a company’s digital universe. According to a 2013 study by Gartner, total spend on “digital marketing” by large companies is now over $500B annually [Tweet This Stat]. Other firms estimate we spend $130B just on our websites. That’s 19% more than we spend on digital advertising (Google Adwords, Facebook and Twitter ads, etc.).

I wonder, though -- is that money well-spent? Or could most of it be going -- well -- right down the toilet.

As an enterprise marketer and everyday consumer, I’ve seen my fair share of corporate websites. Most of them are, sadly, uninspiring, uninteresting, or just outright forgettable.

Then one day I stumbled upon a website of a HubSpot customer where I thought, “Wow, this is a great website.” And trust me, I don’t say that very often. But as a marketer, I tend to appreciate and recognize a job well done. Granted, no website is perfect. But this one does a lot of things right.

The website I’m referring to is from (big reveal) ShoreTel Sky, seen below.

What's so great about this website, you ask? I'll get to that in a minute.

You see, despite more than $130B being invested in our websites each year, shockingly, 72% of websites graded through MarketingGrader receive a failing score of 59 or lower. What gives?

Here are seven reasons why most enterprise websites fall short, and why ShoreTel is a great example of doing it right:

1) No Clear Description or Calls-to-Action

Many websites fail to answer "Who I am," "What I do," and/or "What can you (the visitor) do here."

If you're a well-known brand or company (i.e. Coca Cola) you can probably get away with not having to describe who you are and what you do; but the reality is, many enterprise businesses still need to answer these questions so that each visitor knows they are in the "right place." Steven Krugg sums it up best in his best-selling book, Don't Make Me Think. If visitors can't identify what it is you do or where to go to find what they need within seconds, they won't stick around long.

ShoreTel does a fantastic job of this on their homepage -- describing who they are and what they provide -- and their sub-page descriptions are great, too.

Additionally, ShoreTel's site guides visitors to the next step with calls-to-action (CTAs) that clearly stand out with the right use of size, color, and verbiage. The CTAs are placed both above and below the fold, yet don't interfere with the browsing experience.

The site also has a "sticky" top bar that contains one primary CTA.

2) Cluttered Design

American statistician and professor Edward Tufte once said, “Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information."

Often, marketers tend to over-complicate their websites with too many elements or far too much information. After all, it's more difficult to take away than it is to add. And that, dear marketers, is what causes clutter. In fact, some of the most effective websites are also the simplest.

ShoreTel Sky is a refreshing balance of whitespace and content. You'll notice almost every element serves a purpose.

Here are a few ways this website achieves a clutter-free aesthetic:

• Simple, two-column layout
• Clear headlines, sub-headlines, and body copy
• Great sentence and paragraph spacing
• Lots of whitespace
• Only four primary colors and great contrast
• Great use of icons and graphics

Even we've been redesigning our site pages to focus on simpler design. See examples here and here.

3) Lack of Fresh (and Valuable) Content

Too many enterprises have what I call a brochure-wear website. These are sites that are all pretty pictures and polished product content, but not much else.

The thing is, people don't arrive on your website to hear you talk about yourself. Instead, you need to offer content that is valuable to your audience, whether it be informative, educational, or entertaining. You need content that attracts them to your site and keeps them there.

The best websites publish valuable content often, such as whitepapers, ebooks, videos, graphics, blog posts, and more. ShoreTel publishes more thought-leadership content in one quarter than I see most enterprises publish in a year. All of this regularly published content is what helped them increase search traffic 60% and leads more than 36%.

In addition to their blog, ShoreTel offers a variety of ebooks:

As well as an awesome video library:

4) Difficult to Find the Right Information

According to the Science of Website Redesign, 76% of consumers say the most important factor in a website's design is "the website makes it easy for me to find what I want."

Douglas Hughmanick of Paramount Farming Company says:

“The most important part of a perfectly designed website is connecting the user with the information they came to find. If your design is easy to navigate and captures the interest of the user, you have likely made good design decisions. This doesn’t mean using the same standard layout every time, but thinking through the objective of your project and the audience you are targeting.”

One reason I love ShoreTel Sky's website is the super-simple, no fluff navigation. The site only features a handful of primary navigation options and a simple one-tier drop-down beneath each link, all simply organized and in plain English. Overall, it's very effortless to navigate this website and find the information I'm searching for.

Even if you have multiple divisions or complex product offerings, there are simple ways to organize your website that makes it easy for the visitor to navigate. In ShoreTel's case, their VoIP product offering is on a separate website, but that doesn't always have to be the case. Microsoft is one example of a website with multiple products, most of them as a sub-domain under the primary microsoft.com domain.

5) Not Mobile Optimized

By the end of 2014, more people will access the web via mobile devices than PC. Still, 46% of mobile users have difficulty interacting with websites -- so it makes sense that 62% of companies that designed a website specifically for mobile increase sales. So if you haven't gone mobile yet like these guys, now's the time.

6) Bad at Generating Leads and Demand

We recently learned that the number one most important objective for enterprise marketers this year is to increase new leads and prospects; the second most important objective is brand awareness.

What many marketers might not realize is that both of these objectives are universally linked. The more demand you're able to capture through your website, the more you're able to improve brand perception and awareness organically.

A website that isn't generating leads or demand isn't doing its job. The goal of a website isn't just to sit there and look pretty -- it should be an extension of your sales team to help boost new business.

ShoreTel offers plenty of opportunities to capture leads by using calls-to-action to direct visitors to dedicated landing pages, which contain a form in order to capture a visitor's contact information (thus, generating a "lead" or "prospect"). More importantly, ShoreTel Sky provides a lot of valuable marketing offers that help to generate even more leads that they can then nurture to become sales qualified.

The number one issue I find with most enterprise websites is that they only offer bottom-of-the-funnel offers, such as a "Contact Sales" request. These are only good when a visitor is ready to buy. But we all know that the majority of a buyer's purchasing decision happens before a sales rep even knows about it. A website should contain top-of-the-funnel content (ebooks, infographics, whitepapers, etc.), middle-of-the-funnel content (case studies, demos, etc.), and bottom-of-the-funnel content (product information, contact sales request, etc.) in order to capture demand at every stage of the funnel.

You'll notice a Contact Sales form rests at the bottom of most product pages, because it aligns with the visitor's stage in the buying cycle.

The website also has pop-up Modal Windows:

Now, let's say your business only sells to the Fortune 100, or to a niche audience, and the actual volume of potential traffic and leads are low. Turning your website into an inbound marketing machine will actually help you capture more earned media in the long run, and improve your branding initiatives. That extra boost in engagement and word-of-mouth exposes your brand to more people, and helps turn visitors into fans, and fans into customers.

7) Gobbledygook

I love being in the marketing profession. But there's one thing that embarrasses me as a marketer and that's when I see marketing-speak, or what is often referred to as gobbledygook. Terms like "cutting-edge," "innovative," and "mission-critical" are littered across many enterprise websites.

Gobbledygook exists in a lot of marketing materials and, ironically, it’s only good at reducing your marketability. “When you are talking to your existing and potential customers your job is to use the language that they use,” says David Meerman Scott. “Don’t speak using your own egotistical jargon." 

The best websites, like ShoreTel, avoid the jargon and speak like a human instead of like a corporation. Now, I wouldn't consider myself the primary buyer of a VoIP system. But the language used on ShoreTel's website is so clearly explained, I fully understand what they sell, how their product works, and why I should buy it. Even if you sell complex products, it's Marketing's job to translate that complexity into simplified terms so that even your grandmother has a basic understanding of what you offer.

BONUS: Hear the secret behind ShoreTel Sky's success.

Learn how ShoreTel increased organic search traffic 60%, leads 36%, and qualified leads 110% here, or watch the short video below:

I know ShoreTel isn't the only great enterprise website out there -- which other websites should we be looking at as examples?

Software as a Service (SaaS) companies face some daunting challenges. Principal among them, getting to market, getting to breakeven and getting to market domination before the whole thing goes up in smoke. Marketers can’t do much about getting the technology built out, but they can help to rapidly increase sales without blowing the budget.

Unfortunately, the last part is often what kills the deal—the budget. SaaS Sale Teams and Marketers must pay particularly close attention to customer acquisition costs (CAC) in order to survive. Marketing is only one part of the total CAC, but cost-effective marketing plays an important role. Here are a few tips to keep costs in check while increasing monthly recurring revenue.

Generate Marketing Qualified Leads

Successful SaaS companies work hard on reaching likely subscribers rather than large volumes of marginally qualified inbound leads. This involves targeted inbound marketing and demand generation strategies designed to increase Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). In general, an MQL is already aware of your brand and is currently either exploring or evaluating your SaaS offering for a possible purchase but has not yet signed up for a free trial or demo (those might be defined as SQLs). We’ll handle converting MQLs into SQLs shortly, but first, how do we get more MQLs into and moving through our sales funnel?

Content Marketing and SEO

The strategy here is to hone your website messaging, blog, subscriber emails and all other communications to satisfy the needs of your buyers. The first step is to develop accurate buyer personas through interviews, ideally with real customers.

Next, we want to create content that will attract targeted buyers and appeal to them enough to convert on content offers and email subscriptions. That content must also be optimized for SEO with on-page factors using current best practices and relevant for most likely buyer search phrases.

Successful companies continue to produce targeted content on a regular basis and use marketing automation to track lead engagement and move them through the sales funnel with more personalized, problem-solving content. This approach is the best way to find and attract new buyers via search. While SEO is by far the lowest cost-per-click strategy, creating high quality content can be expensive. Here are some ways to reduce CAC:

• Ask your thought leaders and subject area experts to join the blogging effort
• Get the whole company involved in promoting your content on their LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+ networks
• Join forces with other industry thought leaders in co-authored or co-sponsored blogs, interviews, webinars and speaking engagements
• Pursue content syndication networks to get your blogs and other content published to a broader, but still targeted audience

Demand Generation and PPC

While the inbound marketing methodology is crucial for long-term brand awareness and lead generation growth, it can take many months of consistent content publication to penetrate a new market or develop a solid sales pipeline. Most fast-growing SaaS companies also pursue targeted demand generation campaigns to ramp up MQLs quickly and start producing revenues.

Costs per lead are easier to see in a pay-per-click campaign than they are for content marketing, since there can be more in-house labor or freelance costs involved in creating, designing and promoting content. But if you are in a highly competitive market, costs per click can also get expensive, and if campaigns aren’t carefully managed with very specific goals, costs can get out of control quickly. A few tips for reducing CAC in demand generation:

• Start with a limited budget in multiple channels, testing for highest conversion rates for both leads and MQLs
• Create narrowly focused ad campaigns based on likely buyer personas
• Move budgets into the most successful channels
• Manage PPC campaigns carefully, paying attention to and suppressing irrelevant searches with negative keywords
• Keep an eye on PPC costs, especially cost per conversions

It’s not about reducing budgets or controlling costs; it’s about getting more qualified leads for every dollar spent on marketing.

Convert More MQLs to SQLs

Now that we have qualified buyers coming in through inbound and demand generation campaigns, we want to move them through the sales funnel as quickly as possible without alienating them. Once again, the last part is the tricky part. Step 1 is making sure Free Trial CTAs are visible wherever an MQL chooses to go, including website pages, blog, emails, social profiles and landing pages. While the costs for these steps are a bit more subtle than demand generation campaigns, they do involve content strategy, design and marketing automation to personalize the experience and compel MQLs to take that next step. It’s all about conversion rates at this stage, and a few ways to reduce CAC include:

• In the buyer discovery process (interviews), ask them what would compel them to sign up for a free trial?
• What barriers are there to signing up?
• What are they looking for as an outcome to a free trial?
• What do they need to help them complete the trial?
• Craft these messages into CTAs and landing pages—make sure you answer all buyer questions and avoid barriers wherever possible

Convert More SQLs to MRR

Now that we have converted raw leads into free trial subscribers (SQLs), we want to retain them as customers over the long haul, thereby steadily increasing monthly recurring revenue (MRR). To do that, we need to support them in the free trial process and make sure the software fits their needs like a glove and any concerns are addressed.

Traditionally, this step would be handled by a sales team, and, in many cases, it still is. But digital marketers can help reduce CAC by providing additional content and automated outreach campaigns, including:

• Easy-to-find user resources, how-to-videos, FAQs and user forums to ask and answer questions
• Online learning centers with in-depth how-to’s and tips for success
• Drip email campaigns offering the above resources to help users successfully complete the trial and answer their questions
• Blogs, social media updates and personalized content on the website letting users know about new features or tips on new ways to get more out of the software

The goal in all of this is to stay top-of-mind throughout the marketing and sales process and to provide valuable information that will help qualified buyers become customers. By automating at least some of this process, you can reduce, but not eliminate CAC. At some point, a human touch is still needed to overcome objections, clarify issues and drive home the value of becoming a loyal customer.

Next Post: How to Increase Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

Photo credit: HA! Designs – Artbyheather

Marketing is becoming more accountable before the eyes of corporate leaders. And because of that, it’s important that you know basic distinctions like the difference between generating leads and creating demand. Granted, even experts end up blurring the two because their purposes are so intertwined. Unraveling these connections though is key to explaining the return on every dollar spent on marketing.

First of all, lead generation is one good way to evaluate demand generation. While they both can actually operate independently, it’s only logical to assume they make a good combination. Yet like all good combinations, you need to know where the other starts and the other ends to determine where they connect:

Lead Generation

Definition – A known process of collecting information from potential clients and using that information to boost revenue. Leads can start out as simply as a filled out contact form but are followed constantly using tools and methods until that it results in a sale.

Use – The right resources and a certain amount of time are needed to nurture future leads before they produce a sale. It’s why the B2B sales process remains a long systematic cycle. On the other hand, the fact that a prospect has filled a contact form is already a sign of progress and shows you have a higher chance of a sale already.

Demand Generation

Definition – This method covers all marketing activities that create awareness about your product, company and industry. This is where the more external forms of inbound and outbound marketing are found under. However, the goal of generating leads remains the same (and makes it a point of connection between the two).

Use – In this area, leaders emphasize more creative and adaptive thinking. There is more focus on shifts in the industry’s market. Everyone is constantly on the lookout for new products and services that can disrupt competition in the space. Branding strategies are also given more consideration than strategies further up the funnel.

Relating the Two

When you see the two work in motion, you’d think you were looking at a single marketing entity. In fact, that is why businesses focus on both as much as possible.

For instance, follow-ups are critical for keeping prospects interested enough that they’ll eventually want to get involved with your business. Meanwhile things like more website traffic and social media presence get you the attention you need or else those forms will never be filled in the first place. It’s not so much as which of either you need more but how the amounts will affect both halves.

Last week, I had the honor of being a panelist discussing Social Media Marketing for Startups and beyond in an event organized by SIPA.

I was on the panel with Jason Miller and Adam Helweh.

Most of the participants were from startups and the questions centered around themes such as “How do we get started with social?”, “On which channel should be we allocate our time and resources?” and other related topics.

The interesting point is that these are not necessarily questions that are unique to startups. Though larger companies may have more headcount dedicated to social media, these are some of the same questions that we still continue to hear even from supposedly ‘experienced’ social media hands.

Coming back to the event, the three key points that the panel tried to deliver to the audience were:

1. Don’t create remote, dusty, unmanned outposts: Adam pointed out that while it is tempting to try and establish your brand presence on every new, shiny channel that crops up, if you don’t have the resources and the time to keeping your presence current on that channel, your brand will appear broken to those who visit you there. It is better to not have a presence than to appear as though no one from your company cares enough to keep the content updated.
2. Re-use content: Jason talked about how his team has created the Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to LinkedIn. This is a guide that is over 50 pages long but they have repurposed and reused content from it to fuel their social media and demand generation efforts for an entire quarter. The key message is: don’t go overboard trying to create new content for every channel that you want to be present it. Reuse, repurpose and repost where and when possible
3. Align your social media objectives to your business goals: Being the “boring, old enterprise software guy”, I observed that while social media teams may revel in reaching “vanity metrics” related goals such as ‘n’ new followers, no one else in their company cares for these metrics. If they need to become relevant to their colleagues in other parts of the company, they need to ensure that their goals are aligned with the overarching goals of Marketing, Sales, Customer Support, HR etc. The actual alignment would vary by company but one example that almost always is relevant is tying social media investments to the impact on the Demand Generation process (i.e. how do your efforts on Social Media impact the number of qualified leads and time to revenue?)

It is always interesting to be able to pay it forward to other entrepreneurs and I hope that those in attendance last evening took away a few useful nuggets to work with.

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Ambulance chasing is one of the oldest sales tricks.

Bad reputation set aside, it simply means knowing the signals identifying a potential customer and following them while they are “warm” instead of approaching leads who have shown no recent interest, i.e., “cold” leads.

Leads generated in traditional ways — like trade shows and lists — are already irrelevant by the time they reach you and are considered highly ineffective today. To reach the sales goals you desire, your lead stash needs to be constantly replenished with new and relevant leads for businesses/individuals with an urgent need for your services. Additionally, prospective clients expect you to reach out to them quickly with proven, effective solutions.

The data available across multiple online sources today offers a wealth of opportunities to discover quality leads. It is virtually impossible, however, to exhaust the potential of this data without the help of specialized applications. Here are three tools that will optimize this data for your lead generation.

1. Public web source tracking: Google Alerts

Cost: Free

Most people use Google alerts to keep track of news items about themselves or their own company and competitor. If you know the “trigger keywords” that signal a potential customer, Google alerts can be a great, free tool to generate hot leads.

Examples could be setting an alert for “application outage” when you are selling IT management services or “marketing campaign optimization” when selling SEO software.

Pros: It’s free and very simple to set up.
Cons: Like Google search itself, alerts would require tweaking the phrases and signals to increase accuracy.
proprietary or social sources will not be covered.

2. LinkedIn & Twitter tools: LinkedIn Saved Search, Socedo

Cost: Freemium

If you are in B2B sales and not using LinkedIn and Twitter for prospecting and customer intelligence, you are missing on the best data source available today.

Most people still manually search LinkedIn and Twitter for prospects but very few utilize the still little-known free tools to automate this process.

LinkedIn’s Saved searches bring the leads to you just like Google Alerts. You can set up queries based on your desired criteria (industry, company, LinkedIn group, etc.) and receive email notifications when there are changes in the search results. With the free (Basic) LinkedIn account, you are currently allowed to set up to three saved searches. Upgrading to a paid LinkedIn account allows you to set up more saved search alerts, thus creating more opportunities to find quality leads.

Socedo does the same for Twitter. This service lets you define the keywords that identify your customers and signals along with organizations and people they might already be following. It sends you a daily list of leads and allows you to provide feedback on their quality along with Twitter-based initial interaction with desired leads.

Pros: Scalable cost from free and up per different saved searches. Each network gives you the tools to reach out to leads which in many cases gets you better results than email and phone.
Cons: Requires a bit more knowledge of how LinkedIn and Twitter work to set up and best practices of how to interact with leads.

3. Multi-source signal tracking tools: Lead Space, Infer, Colabo

Cost: starts at $50 per month with free 30 day trial

The next step up in automatically finding your leads goes beyond keyword searches on the public web and LinkedIn searches. It covers multiple sources and applies smarter algorithms to identify the best leads.

Beyond static keyword searched on public web and social sites, these tools also look at live signals across multiple sources (e.g. look for companies that are growing fast in the sales department). Sources can include proprietary apps (e.g. your support forum), vertical news sites (new members of a group or attendees to an event), or geography-specific sources (companies that hired a CFO in the local paper).

This group of tools also has the capabilities to learn the ideal profile of a customer for you and apply it on it’s search results to qualify results.

Last, cross-source tools are useful in determining the optimal mediums (LinkedIn message, email, Twitter DM) through which you should reach out and engage with your prospects.

Pros: Data sources can be customized. Profile of leads are modified on-the-go based on what seems to work. More efficient channels of communications to prospect are discovered.

Cons: Price scales with usage but depending on the vendor can be high. Most likely not suitable for those who haven’t started to use newer sources like LinkedIn

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As prospects are changing their behavior, cold emailing and dialing from an acquired list is becoming a thing of the past. Event-trigger sales is emerging as the new way to discover and qualify leads. The tools mentioned in this post allow you make your first steps in this direction which should yield shorter sales cycles and increased conversion rates quickly.

Yoav Dembak is the CEO and co-founder of Colabo, a self-service data integration and analytics platform that provides lead generation and qualification solutions for sales professionals. Prior to Colabo, Dembak was an executive at VMware following the acquisition of his previous startup, B-hive, a service level analytics provider. Dembak has over 15 years of B2B sales experience.

ROI. It’s the elephant in the room.

In spite of burgeoning internal support and increasing budget, the truth is many content teams still struggle with justifying spend through content marketing ROI, and performance is suffering as a result. 

Want proof? In December, my company released The 2014 Marketing Score Report, which compiled the results of more than 300 assessments taken by marketers, executives, and entrepreneurs. According to our data, respondents’ highest priority goals are focused on the bottom line: generating leads (86 percent) and converting leads into sales (85 percent).

However, when asked to rank overall marketing performance, scores on factors critical to leads and sales were weak. For example, on a scale from one to 10, lead volume scored an average of 3.7; lead quality, 3.1; and lead-to-sale conversion rate, 3.9.

Unfortunately, content marketing was the lowest rated among the Marketing Score’s 10 sections, with an average section score of 25 percent. Of more than 130 factors ranked, six out of the 10 lowest ranked fall under content marketing.

Marketers have more tools and technology at their disposal than ever before, and digital has paved the way for measurable marketing. In spite of this, it seems that content marketers may be failing to connect their activities to desired outcomes — even if those activities actually are achieving these positive benefits.

Why? It’s because many haven’t even taken the first step. In today’s marketing landscape, creating a performance dashboard, or scorecard, is essential to aligning expectations and delivering a successful, bottom-line-focused content marketing strategy.

Your marketing performance scorecard will drive important internal conversations, including:

• Defining your marketing objectives, key performance indicators (KPIs), and goals
• Developing an internal process for updating and reporting results
• Analyzing performance to turn data into intelligence — and intelligence into action.

Let’s walk through the process of building this scorecard using “Social Business Unlimited” (SBU) — a hypothetical B2B company — as an example.

1. Define your objective

The single most important part of an internal goal-setting conversation is to decide on your organization’s primary objective. In general, your choices are:

• Brand: Increase brand awareness and reach.
• Leads: Generate and qualify sales leads.
• Sales: Align marketing and sales to close business.
• Loyalty: Build customer loyalty to increase recurring revenue.

While all stages of the sales process are important, choosing one as paramount will coordinate business functions and bring clarity to your content marketing strategy.

Social Business Unlimited’s sales team has a high close rate, but it needs a boost in leads to meet 2014 revenue goals. SBU’s website receives consistently high traffic, but offers few opportunities for site visitors to become leads. Creating content that supports lead generation will be marketing’s primary focus this quarter.

2. Pick the right KPIs

Once you have your objective, you need to choose the appropriate KPIs — that is, ones that suit your business objective and the specifics of your content marketing campaign. Content marketing KPIs could include:

Objective: Building your brand:

• Website visits
• Referring traffic
• Social reach
• Mobile readership
• Time on site/ time per page
• Pageviews
• Video views
• Ungated content downloads
• Blog subscribers
• Email newsletter subscribers
• Inbound links
• Blog comments

Objective: Generating leads:

• Gated content downloads
• Event attendees
• Webinar registrations
• Marketing qualified leads (MQLs)
• Sales qualified leads (SQLs)
• Conversion rate
• Average lead quality score

Objective: Converting leads into sales: 

• New customers
• Top-converting pages
• Conversion rate
• Content asset ROI
• Cost of customer acquisition (COCA)

Objective: Increasing loyalty:

• Customer lifetime value (CLV)
• Product/service upsells
• Social sharing
• Newsletter subscribers
• Email forwards

SBU is going to focus on content downloads, marketing qualified leads, and sales qualified leads as primary KPIs for its lead generation campaign.

3. Align your marketing efforts

Now it’s time to build a strategy, including content to support campaign goals and analytics to track performance. As Paul Roetzer discussed in his recent CMI post, you need to assess the following areas in order to forecast potential and align expectations:

• Foundation: What is the overall strength of your assets, technology, and processes?
• Platform: How extensive is your current reach and influence among key audiences?
• Expectations: Do business goals align with available talent, technologies and resources? Are expectations for growth realistic?
• Potential: What is the potential for success based on your program’s current state and the effort required to improve weaknesses?

In order to generate leads, SBU will need to create a gated content asset, so marketing decides to create an eBook complete with a landing page, web form, and calls-to-action (CTAs) placed throughout the website.

SBU has a flexible content management system that allows marketing to add CTAs to the website itself, but it doesn’t have the technology to create landing pages and web forms on the fly, so the marketing team will need to enlist the help of IT. SBU’s strong brand presence and optimized website means it should receive enough website traffic to generate needed leads.

4. Build your scorecard and benchmark performance 

Now it’s time to build out a scorecard with supporting KPIs and benchmark current marketing performance. Using available analytical tools, document monthly metrics, filling in historical data if possible. Make note of any business seasonality, holidays, or other outliers that might impact marketing data.

For example, SBU was able to record its performance for the past 6 months:

Set up a process internally to support the monthly maintenance of the scorecard, as well as processes for reporting and sharing data.

5. Set realistic goals

Using benchmark data, available industry metrics, and your organizational assessment, set realistic goals for what you can achieve. SBU could do this one of two ways:

• Work forwards: Calculate the average monthly percentage growth over the past six months, and use that trajectory to set monthly metric goals for the next quarter. Evaluate each metric individually to account for the strengths and weaknesses of your current marketing program, and reevaluate goals quarterly based on performance.
• Work backwards: If you have access to sales data and a marketing service level agreement (SLA), use sales revenue targets and work backward to the sales qualified leads, marketing qualified leads, content downloads and visitors necessary to achieve business goals. This approach requires closed-loop tracking capabilities and transparency across all functions of the marketing and sales process.

Because the marketing team has access to customer relationship management (CRM) data, SBU will choose to “work backwards” towards setting its goals:

• New monthly revenue target: $25,000
• Percent of new revenue needed from the content campaign: 75 percent, or $18,750
• Average revenue per client: $10,000
• Monthly new client rate: 1.9
• Lead-to-customer rate: 1.5 percent
• Monthly MQLs needed: 125

(Tip: HubSpot has an easy-to-use tool to help you calculate this.)

Now the SBU marketing team knows to aim for 125 content downloads this month, and it can use the popularity of existing gated content to estimate the needed downloads for its new eBook campaign. The team could also leverage the eBook in an email marketing campaign to further qualify existing leads and potentially pass contacts on to sales.

6. Monitor performance and maximize impact

As you track monthly data, it is essential that you assess performance regularly and make adjustments across the funnel to improve. For example:

• If visits are low, you need to focus on optimizing your website, frequently publishing ungated content (such as blog posts), and guest blogging to increase your brand reach.
• If pageviews and time on site are low, make sure your content is informative, engaging, built around your buyer personas, and directs visitors to the next action you want them to take.
• If you need to increase MQLs, increase gated content, add more CTAs to your gated content, and think about shortening lead forms to increase submissions.
• If you need to increase SQLs, activate new lead nurturing programs and reevaluate lead scoring criteria.

By holding your team accountable to measurable business goals, you’ll find your content marketing strategy immediately becomes more focused, and your impact more tangible.

Cover image via Bigstock

I have been reading a fair amount on industry blogs lately, about how one should implement an Inbound Marketing Automation System in one’s organization. Usually the advice given suggests that you start with one small piece of the puzzle and then take a step-by-step approach to implement a complete system.

It sounds logical and sensible, but for 2 reasons, I caution you against using this approach:

1. You don’t build strong, complex structures by starting to dig a hole and then pouring in some concrete; you begin with a plan. You spend a bunch of time designing the building first, identifying all its pieces, and making sure that they all work together to produce the desired function and form. And then you begin building it according to your plan. One step at a time, but all orchestrated towards the common vision of what that building is going to be. In terms of your Sales and Marketing Automation system (or SAMA, as we call it), you start with a plan that shows which pieces you are going to automate, when each one will be tackled, how they will work together, and you specify precisely what each one will do to assist your people. How else can you design the overall process your company will need, to make use of the SAMA system efficiently?

• The entire Inbound funnel requires automation because of the speed of response required and the sheer volume of information that has to be processed. Automating parts, but leaving others manual, guarantees failure in my opinion. So the implementation should be staged into a design phase, and then an execution one.

To implement a Sales and Inbound Marketing Automation solution, I would design the roadmap (the Project Plan), to take me from where I am today, to where I want to be with Inbound Marketing. My roadmap will need to deal with the following stages:

1. Educating myself on the options, tools, and services out there so that I know which ones I need to implement.

• Make a short list of these tools and evaluate them. Choose each tool and service. If you’d like to know more about doing this, read Choosing a SAMA System.
• Design your online identity by selecting your keyword or keyword phrases.
• Create content.
• Align your content with your keyword identity.
• Automate the process.
• Train your users.
• Promote (links).
• Promote (social media).

These last two steps really drive up the volume, so you want to have the automation system in place by then.

Of course, your real SAMA Roadmap is going to contain more steps and much more detail than this, and you should not be surprised if the first 2 steps take a few months elapsed. There are indeed a great many tools and options available on the market and new ones are announced often. Once you know which tools you are going to use, you must then study their technical specifications (their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)), to understand what you must do to make each tool or service work with the others. If necessary, design, build and then test any software you need to make it all work seamlessly.

Of course, you could also save yourself a great deal of time and money and hire an expert to help:

1. Design your SAMA roadmap.

• Agree on what measures and metrics will be considered a success.
• Choose from among the available tools and services.
• Specify any needed software connections between these tools.
• Implement the tool set.
• Train your people.
• Set up the automated campaigns (drip mails).
• Chair combined meetings of sales and marketing people to ensure the capture of your best practices regarding what makes a good lead, how to nurture leads, and how to sell the hot prospects.
• Set up the scoring and grading rules.
• Monitor the resulting processes and check the results against the desired objectives.

Any mix of the above services and help may be needed, it all depends on how technical you are and how much time you have to dedicate to the project.

Good luck with it all.

Image via Shutterstock

There's a lot to say when it comes to how to do email marketing well. We could talk for days about the most critical components of an optimized email, common email marketing mistakes you might be making, and examples of brilliant email marketing that will inspire you. But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how optimized your emails are if you can't see the results of your efforts -- not to mention measure whether email is helping you hit your goals.

So before sending your next email, pause for a few minutes and ask yourself: What is the goal of my email marketing? Is it to grow my subscriber database? Generate more leads? To convert more existing leads into customers? Whatever you decide your goal is (and you can have more than one), the next thing you need to do is figure out which metrics you'll need to track in order to determine how you're progressing toward that goal.

Let's take a look at the metrics you should be paying attention to in your email marketing efforts. We'll start with the metrics every email marketer should be tracking, and then we'll take a look at how to tie certain metrics to your specific goals.

6 Metrics Every Email Marketer Should Be Tracking

1) Clickthrough Rate

Clickthrough rate (CTR) is likely the first answer you'll get when you ask an email marketer what metrics they track. It's what I like to call the "day-to-day" email marketing metric, because it lets you easily calculate performance for every individual email you send. From there, you can track how your CTR changes over time.

CTR is also frequently used for determining the results of A/B tests, as these tests are often designed with the intention of finding new ways to get more clicks in your emails. Clickthrough rate is a very important metric for all email marketers to be tracking, as it gives you direct insight into how many people on your list are engaging with your content and interested in learning more about your brand or your offer.

2) Conversion Rate

After an email recipient has clicked through on your email, the next goal is typically to get them to convert on your offer -- in other words, to take the action that your email has asked them to take. So if you're sending an email to offer your audience the chance to download, say, a free ebook, you'd consider anyone who actually downloads that ebook to be a conversion.

Because your definition of a conversion is directly tied to the call-to-action in your email, and your call-to-action should be directly tied to the overall goal of your email marketing, conversion rate is one of the most important metrics for determining the extent to which you're achieving your goals. (We'll discuss more specific goal-related metrics later.)

3) Bounce Rate

Bounce rate measures the percentage of your total emails sent that could not be delivered to the recipient's inbox. There are two kinds of bounces to track: “hard” bounces and “soft” bounces.

Soft bounces are the result of a temporary problem with a valid email address, such as a full inbox or a problem with the recipient’s server. The recipient’s server may hold these emails for delivery once the problem clears up, or you may try re-sending your email message to soft bounces.

Hard bounces are the result of an invalid, closed, or non-existent email address, and these emails will never be successfully delivered. You should immediately remove hard bounce addresses from your email list, because internet service providers (ISPs) use bounce rates as one of the key factors to determine an email sender’s reputation. Having too many hard bounces can make your company look like a spammer in the eyes of an ISP.

4) List Growth Rate

Aside from the call-to-action metrics (CTR, conversion rates), you'll also want to be keeping tabs on your list growth and loss. Of course, you should be aiming to grow your list in order to extend your reach, expand your audience, and position yourself as an industry thought leader. But believe it or not, there's a natural decay of your email marketing list, and it expires by about 25% every year -- which means that it's more important than ever to pay attention to growing your subscriber list and keeping it at a healthy size.

5) Email Sharing/Forwarding Rate

The rate at which your email recipients forward or share your email with others may not seem all that significant, but it's arguably one of the most important metrics you should be tracking.

Why? Because this is how you generate new contacts. The folks on your email list are already in your database. So while conversion is still a primary focus, this doesn't help you attract new leads. Encourage your readers to pass along your email to a friend or colleague if they found the content useful, and start tracking how many new people you can add to your database this way.

6) Overall ROI

As with every marketing channel, you should be able to determine the overall ROI of your email marketing. If you haven't yet, set up an SLA system whereby you assign different values to various types of leads based on their likelihood to generate revenue for your company.

How many of each of these types of leads did you generate via email marketing? How does this translate to potential revenue? Actual revenue? These are the types of metrics that will help you show your boss and your sales team how valuable email marketing is as a channel that drives real, tangible results.

Which Metrics to Track, Based on Your Goals

The goal of your email marketing may be very different from the goals of another company like yours, and may even vary within your own company over time. But again, it's crucial that you determine exactly what it is you're looking to achieve with your email marketing before you begin (or continue) to send and measure your emails.

Here's how you can align your specific goal with key metrics.

1) Subscriber List Growth Rate

If your focus is on growing the top of your funnel -- attracting more visitors to your site, signing up more blog subscribers, getting more people to use your free tools, that kind of thing -- your goal will probably be growing your subscriber list. Your emails will likely contain calls-to-action such as "Subscribe to Our Blog" or "Join Our Weekly Email List." So of course, the most important metric you should be tracking for this goal is the growth rate of your subscriber list.

2) # of New (or Total) Leads Generated

Maybe instead of focusing on subscribers, you'd like to work on growing lead generation. If this is the case, you should be sending emails that offer lead generation content -- in other words, content that requires the viewer to fill out a lead capture form in order to access it.

If the goal of your email marketing is lead gen, you should be tracking how many leads you're capturing every day, and every month. You can decide to focus on all leads generated, or only new ones added to your database, depending on your priorities.

3) Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rate

Finally, let's say you want to focus more toward the middle/bottom of your marketing funnel, and convert more of your existing leads into customers. If this is your goal, the emails you're sending will likely provide content more closely related to your business and your product or service. Your calls-to-action may include "Get a demo," "Watch a Video of Our Product in Action," or "Start a Free Trial." If this is your goal, you should be tracking changes in your lead-to-customer conversion rate.

As obvious as this all seems, you'd be surprised how many email marketers determine their goals and then don't bother to track their progress against them. Make sure that you're able to track how closely you're trending toward your goal at any point during the month, and that you're looking carefully at any changes in these metrics month over month.

2 Metrics You Don't Need to Track Closely

It's worth mentioning that there are also a couple of email marketing metrics that really aren't worth tracking closely.

1) Open Rate

Most email marketers are still bent over backwards trying to optimize their subject lines for higher open rates. While this can have a positive impact -- and more opens are a great thing -- they really should be focused on optimizing their clickthrough rates, instead.

The fact of the matter is that open rate is actually a very misleading metric for a few reasons -- but most importantly, an email is only counted as "opened" if the recipient also receives the images embedded in that message. And a large percentage of your email users likely have image-blocking enabled on their email client. This means that even if they open the email, they won’t be included in your open rate, making it an inaccurate and unreliable metric for marketers, as it underreports on your true numbers.

(Note: You can get some value out of open rate as a metric if you use it as a comparative metric. For instance, if you compare the open rates of this week's email send to last week's email send -- both to the same lists -- it might give you some insight since the variables are somewhat controlled.)

2) Unsubscribe Rate

As with open rate, the unsubscribe rate isn’t a reliable picture of the health of your email list. Many subscribers who are tired of receiving email messages from your brand won’t bother to go through the formal unsubscribe process. They’ll just stop opening, reading, and clicking on your email messages.

That's why it's much more effective to measure subscriber engagement by clickthrough rates and conversion rates. Checking your monthly unsubscribe rate is helpful for calculating your overall list growth rate, though, so do keep an eye on it every once in a while.

The Bottom Line: Be smart about which metrics you're tracking, and make sure you're able to effectively measure your individual email performance, the health of your email list, and your progress toward your overarching goals. As long as you're able to determine each of those, you're on the right track for more effective email marketing.