Rnordman

Like all B2B leads, ERP software leads are the result of a long (and at times, arduous) sales process. They’re not even the whole of it (maybe half, three-quarters perhaps). But despite that process, you should never underestimate the seemingly trivial role of a prospect’s eyes and ears.

When it comes to using media, B2B marketing is seen as very, very far from the mainstream. It’s hard to blame the professionals in the field. Things like ads, online memes, and the idea of branding are still mostly associated in the B2C realm.

That doesn’t make it less of a problem.

Take logos for example. According to HubSpot, B2B companies can actually stick out more if they used logos that are easier to remember. They even set up some standards on what would make a suitable one for businesses like ERP software vendor.

You might think that there’s a lot more that needs to be done and surely a logo barely scratches the surface. And yes, you’re right. In fact Hubspot’s own guidelines don’t just apply to what a prospect sees but what they hear too!

Look at your telemarketing script. Is your business name hard or silly to pronounce? That’s the concept of usability and legibility all in one package. It kind of makes you think twice about giving your company name that fancy, corporate feel when it barely rolls of the tongue.

So what exactly are the traits that make your business easy on a prospect’s eyes and ears? Here are some things to consider.

#1. It goes well with pictures

Having a long sales process is easily understandable when you have so much information to share. After all, you can’t just sum up an enterprise system in one or two words. However, doesn’t a single picture paint a thousand words?

Suppose during a telemarketing call or an email exchange, your prospect gives that much desired request for more information. What’s faster for them to read, an infographic or a long, 20-page white paper?

In fact, it doesn’t matter where you point a prospect for more information. You can point them to a website, a social media page, or a blog. You will still be the old scribe who lives in an electronic age where visuals communicate more information than just words alone.

#2. You can say it once

Though speaking of which, prospects don’t just talk about your business when you’re calling them. Chances are they’ll be talking about you with their colleagues as well. It’d certainly make for a less awkward meeting if they knew how to say your company’s name right. The same goes for sales presentations.

It’s not limited to the name either. Controlling the amount of information during each phase of the process keeps it from clogging. Avoid jargon (especially during the early stages when you’ve just connected). Understand how prospects digest information with each step they take and whatever channel they go through. (On that note, make sure your content is able to fit through these channels as well).

#3. Google likes it

There are far too many ways to get a search engine’s attention. But if that’s one action you’re prompting in your calls or emails, don’t make it hard to even type. There are usually two general reasons your company’s name ends up there. It’s either a) unique yet easy enough that it’s not confused with anyone else’s or b) you’ve optimized your site in that it tops competitors no matter generic your site’s name may be.

You also need a clearer idea of where the customer might be if they’re using a search engine. If you’re marketing is more inbound, you should hope that you are searchable without any direct prompting. And if you’re more outbound, you should be ready to guide a prospect during the search.

Don’t always presume that the action is in the sales appointment. You know all too well that without leads, none of that action is ever going to happen. That’s why, as trivial as it sounds, even marketing enterprise software has to be easy on the eyes and the ears.

In recent history, we can only think of a few words that could live longer than the person who had said them. But if we look back more than a hundred years from now, we could see that their words have endured until today. It’s a mystery as to why people from the past just had the knack for uttering timeless declarations and insights.

One great example is Abraham Lincoln. As the 16th President of the United States, Lincoln became famous primarily because of his contributions to the abolition of slavery and the American Civil War. But aside from his nationalistic achievements, Lincoln is also known for his oratory skills. He has articulated some of the most memorable lines throughout his political career.  His Gettysburg Address in 1863 became the most quoted speech in US history.

His words live on as we apply them in the perspective of marketing:

1. Prepare for challenges. Lincoln once said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.”This simply takes on his dedication to get ready and organize things before an undertaking. Marketers should understand that the more time spent on preparation, the less work they have to do in executing.
2. Take action. Defying the age-old mantra, Lincoln said, “Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.”He didn’t believe that to achieve something, we have to wait. One must move to act in order to gain momentum and get things rolling. Opportunities are more likely to come when you are hustling.
3. Protect your name. The responsibility of upholding a reputation lies on the marketers of a brand. They’re the ones who reveal information to the world, and that task could always go either way. As Lincoln once said, “Reputation is like fine china, once broken it’s very hard to repair.”
4. See the brighter side of things. It is crucial for marketers to develop a sense of optimism because their points of view could always dictate the manner in which they would execute their plans for the company. When bad things happen, they should learn how to see beyond the mess. Take it from Lincoln: “We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.”
5. Walk the talk. Anyone could say anything without really meaning it. When a company puts out a statement to the world, the world will watch whether the company will stay true to its words. “Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm”, Lincoln said.
6. Make the most out of it. Lincoln didn’t live a long life, but it was a life well spent. Sometimes we are only given our due time to do what we have to do, and we’ll never know how far we could go. In any case, it’s always better to seize every chance to do better. Lincoln said, “And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” 

This content originally appeared at Callbox Blog.

By David Monson, Director of Sales Enablement

“Random acts of sales support undermine the best-laid strategies” - Scott Santucci, Forrester Research

Problem Statement: while financial objectives are very specific and constantly fine tuned, strategic objectives are often left ambiguous. This ambiguity leads to a proliferation of misaligned sales enablement activities that if left unchecked will do more harm than good.

Recommendation: start with the following line of questioning: assuming two closed/won opportunities are of equal dollar value, would one ever be considered more valuable than the other? If so, why? What are the characteristics of your “ideal” opportunities? Did your answer have something to do with the way the opportunity was conducted as well as the components of the solution that were included? Answering these types of questions will help you define what your strategic objectives are in terms that will align and guide sales enablement throughout your organization.

Sales organizations are naturally obsessed with numbers—quantifiable outcomes are the name of the game whereas strategic outcomes tend to be less well defined. Naturally, when you eat what you kill, you pay close attention to the size of that kill. Starting with the financial objectives coming from the executive team, everyone in a sales organization has a quota (from the sales executive on down). And the upside of most compensation plans fixates the organization on the rewards that come with progress towards achieving these financial goals. Yet, if you were to ask just about anyone in these same organizations to articulate the organization’s strategic goals I’m pretty sure you will get as many different answers for as many times you ask the question.

The consequence of this ambiguity gets more and more expensive as companies grow. Sales enablement takes on many forms: campaigns, collateral, training, events, travel expenses, support technology, etc. In many organizations the cost of the resources supporting each sales rep can easily exceed the base salaries of those reps. How does this happen? Well, as each one of these resources is defined and rolled out, each group responsible tends to answer differently the question of, “What are our strategic objectives?” Further, I’ve observed that as companies mature from start up, to small, then medium and finally large organizations they want to constantly increase the size and “stickiness” of their deals. Inevitably, companies have to increase the number and complexity of their solutions to accomplish this, and invariably, the number and complexity of sales enablement efforts runs parallel.

The result is a constant proliferation of sales enablement initiatives in a desperate attempt to compensate for the challenges created by this increased complexity. The learning curve for new reps continuously gets steeper as does the need to constantly push your seasoned reps out of their comfort zone. Ask the sales managers in companies where this has played out and they will tell you how often they run interference against a constant line of supplicants seeking the attention of their sales team. The higher the volume of misaligned sales enablement efforts, the more likely sales enablement efforts will be actively tuned out, resulting in a death spiral of diminishing returns.

The path to recovery is simple: define your ideal opportunities. To eliminate the ambiguity of your strategic objectives you need definition at a tactical level that can be translated more readily into operational front line action. The currency of a sales organization is won opportunities, so start by asking questions like “Dollar for dollar, which of these opportunities is worth more?” Or, in other words assuming two won opportunities are of equal dollar value, would one ever be considered more valuable than the other? Yes or no? No one ever answers no this question—there is always something that makes some deals more valuable than others, whether it has to do with the nature of the product or the way it is sold or delivered.

To better define your ideal opportunity types make sure you examine both the “what” and the “how” aspects. At the end of the month or quarter look at your list of won opportunities—the “what” is usually obvious since you’ve probably got an invoice or proposal that documents the specific products and services that were included, but the “how” is not so easily evaluated. Some high value outlier opportunities will jump out and everyone will be saying, “Why can’t all our reps close deals like this one” but on closer examination you may find they were won by personal heroics that would burn out people or departments if you tried to scale them up. In other cases, you might see that one of your teams has tapped into a new market segment or buyer persona. Investigate how they did it. Can you duplicate their success? If so you’ve got a new ideal opportunity type.

These ideal opportunity types become the measure by which you determine the alignment of any proposed sales enablement efforts. When someone proposes to invest in a new tool or resources ask, “To what degree does this tool or resource assist in closing one of these opportunity types?” Create a simple rubric and use it to assign a numeric value to existing or proposed resources. You will likely discover gaps where an opportunity type you’d like to see more of has been ignored by your sales enablement efforts. When you can describe your ideal opportunities in terms of the “what” (product/service set you want included) and the “how” (process by which you want it sold and delivered), you will have defined your strategic objectives in terms that will align and guide sales enablement throughout your organization.

Last week we looked at why we need to do a bit of work on our pricing to help insulate the P part of things from the L part of things and come up looking pretty good despite having mucked up the budget and let sales have its way with revenue.

This week, let’s talk about Sales Squirrels and how they can turn your thoughtful price book into a soggy mess of discounts, rebates and freebies, also known as the Pocket Price.

Years ago, I worked with a sales executive who believed that all sales involved a plate of cookies. Not a literal plate of cookies; that would have been far easier. What he had in mind was the assumption that nobody pays list price and, depending on the client, sales offers a number of incentives, or cookies, to close the business.

In addition to being easier to spell, cookies sound way less horrible than words like “free”, “waived”, “complimentary” and “discount”. But the sound at the end of the deal is the same: it’s the sucking sound that profits make as they are going down the drain.

Whether or not the metaphor of cookies is your thing, the chances are, your Sales Squirrels are walking into their accounts with their cheeks bulging with concessions. The team manager wants free training? No problem. The P-cube dude wants you to deliver it for free? Done! The project manager thinks she can sell it to IT if you’ll just waive the set-up charges? Okey dokey. The finance director says his VP would feel much better if you just knocked 15 points off the whole thing. You got it! And to sweeten the deal for the board, the CFO would love to see free custom reporting for the next five years. Yabba dabba do!

What you end up with is the Pocket Price. That’s the amount of money you actually see after all the deals are cut, but before you pay out commission, COGS and sales expenses. The waterfall on one of these looks a lot like this one from Deloitte:

The problem is that it’s not even a little bit transparent and every order in this scenario becomes a custom order. Which is fine if you sell yachts, or hydro electric dams or things that go to space but doesn’t scale very well for those us selling professional services, software and stuff that mushes up spinach. What we want is something predictable, repeatable and, oh, I don’t know, profitable.

The interesting thing about the cookies, is that they are never about the product, the features or the competition. They are about one person at one point in the buying cycle seeing what they can get away with, what will make it look like they tried to negotiate and what they could, if you blow it, dangle in front of your competition. I’ll bet half the time the Squirrel offers the cookie long before the buyer even thinks they’re hungry.

Yet, when you challenge your Squirrels on pocket prices, the very first thing you are likely to hear goes something like “well it’s not like we’re exactly competitive so if you want me to close deals, I gotta match the street.” Except that nobody actually asked them to match or beat a competitive price. If the only cookie your customers can think to ask for is money flavoured, then your sales team has not been selling on – say it with me– Value.

I think there are three reasons our Squirrels go to the price. First, they don’t really understand, and, hence, don’t really trust the price justification. This applies, incidentally, at both the top and the bottom of the market.

The second is the wildly mixed messages they’ve been getting for years from sales managers, most of which come down to “get the highest price you can, unless of course it’s quarter-end, and in that case, drop your trousers and explain later.” Pocket Price indeed.

The third reason is plain old-fashioned fear. If your squirrels are up against a lower-priced competitor, they are terrified they’ll lose the deal on price. Features and benefits are honourable ways to lose, but to most Squirrels, losing on price is pretty humiliating.

So what do we do? Shooting Squirrels is mean and very messy, especially if your cubicles are the fabric kind. Here are six things marketing can try that doesn’t involve gloves.

First, stop looking at our competitors’ prices. You do it. I do it. We all do it. And then we tell the Squirrels what those prices are. And then while they’re baking cookies to make the price thing go away, we make a slide deck to show them the value of the product. I say we take that right off the battle cards and train instead on a general conversation around price objections.

Second, use your personas and map your sales process in excruciating detail. Then train your Squirrels to leave the cookies in the car and sell the value to each persona in terms they (the persona) understand. The person who wants free training really just wants to understand what they get for the training charge. The free delivery guy would love to hear your plan to make sure everything arrives on time in each location and mostly in one piece. The CFO would much rather tell the board she is going with a premium product because it solves a big problem than the cheapest thing she could find that might make everyone feel a little better. Role-play the heck out of that stuff and you’ll get the Squirrels off the price thing.

If you have senior buy-in on this issue, assign an executive to each key account. This reinforces a value and service statement and not many customers would have the nerve to ask your president for a discount. I would hope most of your Squirrels would have the smarts not to offer one.

Depending on how you qualify your leads, you might consider putting in price acceptance as a criterion. It’s mean, but a Sales Accepted Lead that doesn’t care about price is a whole different conversation if the cookies come out.

I know we keep saying it, but if you really want to create a disincentive to stupid discounts, stop creating stupid incentives. Every time we do another sales contest, quarter-end blitz or Olympic themed spiff, we are more or less telling sales to get out the cookies. If you can figure out an incentive that’s tied to higher selling price or net revenue that’s a different thing all together. In fact, if we can figure out how to tie sales compensation to profitability… well that’s just dreaming, now isn’t it?

Are your sales and marketing relationships on a path toward power
or toxicity?

Historically, the inability to track marketing efforts and correlated results has been a major factor in misaligned sales and marketing departments. Before the internet age, marketing to customers was like setting up a blind date for your cousin because your parents had that expectation. Back then, as little as 10 years ago, marketing arranged the blind dates for sales, the cousin.

The lucky girl that went on one unsuccessful date with your cousin was just a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend. And you weren’t close with your cousin–so everything turned out alright for you, and your cousin continued on his path of frustration.

But things have changed. We are deep into the “internet age” and blind dating has turned into informed dating (it includes cyber-stalking and seemingly open, one-sided communication about interests and demographic data). In the “beyond age,” marketing is accountable for revenue and sales has greater expectations regarding marketing qualified leads. Basically, when you arrange a blind date for your cousin, he’s going to cross-reference the details you provided with OKCupid, Facebook, and the vast sea of information contained in his favorite search engine. No more getting off scot-free.

With a new outlook on dating (and on buyer behavior), it’s more important than ever to play it smart. Stop frustrating your cousin. And to play Devil’s Advocate, sales needs to be clear about his preferences in a mate.

With a new sales-marketing alignment comes a responsibility to aim higher and to create a Power Couple relationship, as the Toxic Couple is doomed for failure.

(Click the infographic below for full size viewing)

It can sometimes feel like marketers are from Venus and salespeople are from Mars. They often have a rocky relationship and argue with each other over lead quality, follow-up procedures, social media monitoring, and cost vs. revenue (among other things).

In the middle of this bickering, it's hard to know what marketers and salespeople really think of each other. Is it truly a dysfunctional relationship, or is it simply a few miscommunications that, if solved, could turn their relationship into a classic love story?

To find out what's really going on, HubSpot and LinkedIn Sales Solutions joined forces to uncover the truth. Together, we surveyed marketers and salespeople around the globe to get to the heart of the matter.

In the SlideShare below, you'll see our findings from the survey and the answer to the timeless question, "Are sales and marketing in a loveless marriage, and if so, how can it be fixed?

A Sales and Marketing Love Story from HubSpot All-in-one Marketing Software

Want to see what some of our findings about the sales-marketing relationship? Here are eight interesting statistics that came from our survey

1) 41% of marketers don't use buyer personas. (Tweet This Stat)

2) 95% of marketers said that lead quality is important to them. (Tweet This Stat)

3) Only 5% of marketers feel they give sales a perfect-fit lead. (Tweet This Stat)

4) 40% of marketers don't know what a marketing- or sales-qualified lead is. (Tweet This Stat)

5) 59% of marketers have no formal agreement with sales to determine both teams' responsibilities. (Tweet This Stat)

6) 87% of salespeople think they do a good job of following up with leads marketing gives them, but only 64% of marketers agree. (Tweet This Stat)

7) 88% of salespeople think that their marketing teams are a crucial source of revenue. (Tweet This Stat)

8) 72% of marketers believe their sales team is collaborative. (Tweet This Stat)

Since this topic is close to our hearts at HubSpot and LinkedIn, we want to fix this broken relationship. That's why we created the ebook, How to Create a Love Story Between Sales & Marketing. Download your copy below to learn how your sales and marketing teams can live happily ever after!

If you think that you know everything about appointment setting, then you are probably right. You may have learned a lot during training, or probably during the time you have spent on the marketing floor. If not, then either you learned nothing at all, or you are just too lazy to pick up anything useful during your marketing campaign. In any case, you need to be aware of the basics in getting the attention of B2B leads. Really, even if you know a lot, you tend to forget the basics. If you lack the knowledge, then knowing these basics will keep you in the right track.

So, where should we start?

1. Be confident – this is a big game-changer for marketers. It defines your ability in convincing business prospects to sign up to your services or buy your products. This is especially important in areas where telemarketing is involved. The tone of your voice will reflect your confidence. If you are nervous or afraid, it will also show in your voice. And it never went well for that marketer.
2. Be natural – when talking to business prospects, you need to be normal and real in your conversations. You want to keep their attention, right? The best way to do that is by being yourself. Sounding canned or scripted will only drive them away. No one wants to hear a fake talk. There is that uncomfortable feeling about it, you know.
3. Be attentive – this might be something that you have heard all the time, but this is also the same rule that many in the lead generation business tend to forget. Listening well to what prospects say can give you clues on the best way to approach them. This is essentially the one element that you should never underestimate.
4. Be certain – some marketers simply assume that they know what their prospects want. Nothing can be farther from the truth than that. To be an effective appointment setter, and to create some credibility with your sales leads prospects, you need to be sure that what you offer is what they want. You cannot waste your time and effort correcting mistakes.
5. Be creative – you see, creativity is the well-spring of all successful appointment setting campaigns. By tapping into your creative juices, you can come up with unique or tailored business solutions that your prospects will like. Besides, creativity can help you in the innovation process, letting you plan out how to best adapt to changes in the market quickly enough.

Really, these are the most important elements to a successful and convincing marketing campaign. As a marketer, you need to build up your reputation. You need to know how to talk to prospects properly, ensure the proper delivery of products and services, as well as build a good, working relationship with them. Of course, if you find these tasks to daunting, or if you lack the skills for it, then you can also outsource this to a professional appointment setting agency. That would do the trick.

This content originally appeared at Callbox Blog.

I’m a brand strategist and also a regular speaker at conferences on the topic of integrating social media, content and SEO into your marketing strategies. We work a lot in the B2B space and I joke (with love) that my clients are often a bunch of middle-aged senior leaders who don’t get just exactly how the web has changed marketing, and they really don’t get social networking. Even more important, it’s often a stretch for them to think beyond the traditional selling methods they’ve used for decades, many of which have been very successful, and consider how important it is to change with the times and adopt your marketing strategies to fit consumer behavior.

Part of my job is convincing them that their customers are using social media networks, their prospects are using social media networks and, quite likely, their prospects are using social media networks. To, well, you know, network. Meet people. Prospect for new business and engage with existing customers and make sure you’re keeping them happy. You know – all that.

Many of my peers in the industry scoff at marketers or look with disdain at business owners who’ve not yet understood the importance of leveraging the web to grow their businesses, which just about always includes a mixture of creating great content, smart SEO tactics and the use of social media channels in a strategic manner. But I feel differently.

The Front Lines: That’s Where It’s Real

My team and I are on the front lines with our clients and prospective clients on a daily basis. We mostly work with marketing teams and/or business owners, most of whom are really smart people. Well, actually, all of them are really smart people. Yet many of them, either due to lack of understanding or expertise, lack of human resources or lack of budget, just haven’t yet been able to connect and power what they are doing off line with what they’re doing online. Which is actually kind of awesome, because that’s typically brings us together.

I’ll give you an example. One of our newest prospective clients is a super smart business owner with a tremendously successful business, who probably just spent upwards of $20K to upgrade their corporate website. It looks great visually, the brand messaging is good, and yet they’ve had a whopping 54 visits to the website since January 2012. They’ve been relying wholly on the efforts of their sales team and face-to-face selling in an industry and with a product that’s totally a “human” product. No social networking, no content creation, no social media presence. And, most importantly, no leveraging of the web to drive leads and sales. Be still my heart. I love a client like this more than almost anything, because it’s a chance for us to get involved, do what we know will work, and produce some awesome results. Why anyone in my peer group would look down at a client or an opportunity like that, just because they’re not there yet is beyond me.

Let’s Look at the Data: Just How Many Social Media Users Are There?

My point in the foregoing is simple. There are businesses of all shapes and sizes selling and making and doing all kinds of things that haven’t yet realized the power of the Internet as it relates to their businesses and their customers and taken steps to leverage that. In spite of the fact that, at least in many instances, that’s where their customers and prospects are going to find the products or services they sell and/or where they go to decide vet who they want to buy from.

These numbers, in an infographic produced by Dustin.tv, prompted this post. Just take a gander at how many users there are in a variety of social media channels, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+ (take this number with a grain of salt, please) and Pinterest. That’s a WHOLE LOT of people! Errr, prospects.

Social Media: That’s Where Trust Happens

If you’re one of the marketers or business owners who’s not yet seen the value of leveraging the Web for your marketing and sales efforts and/or who’s not yet figured out that social media channels are filled with customers – your customers – maybe this will inspire you to think differently in 2014. One final data point on that topic, 92% of consumers trust social media recommendations more than any other kind of recommendation (think email, tv, print, outdoor ads or radio). And it’s because they come from people, and they trust people more than they trust advertising. So if you’re not there, and not participating in social media channels, you’re missing lots of opportunities.

And also? If you’re one of those marketers that I meet at conferences who laughingly tells me that social media is for the youngsters and you don’t really participate – did you see the news about the trends of reductions in marketing departments? This is a bandwagon that makes sense for you to get on, figure out, and learn how to tie to business initiatives. Those are the marketers who will have jobs in the future.

Infographics via Dustn.tv

photo credit: Book Worm Laser & Design via photopin cc

Every year, we like to check in with our customers to see how our software is working for their businesses. We team up with an MBA candidate at MIT Sloan to see just what kind of ROI our customers are getting out of our software. They send a survey to almost 2,000 customers and investigate those customers' quantitative results to get a comprehensive answer to one question: are our customers successful?

In a word ... yes.

But if you're looking for a more nuanced answer, check out the report yourself or keep on reading. We have two big, glaring takeaways as well as some of the most exciting pieces of data to show you why -- and how -- inbound marketing is working for our customers. 

Inbound helps them build a sustainable business model. 

Investing in inbound means our customers are getting consistent traffic and leads coming to their sites every single month. If they can put in the work for that investment, they'll be setting their business up for long term, sustainable business growth.

Don't believe me? Check out the stats. In the report, we found that:

• Within 6 months, customers were reaching 2x more visitors in a month.
• Within 1 year, customers reached 3.5x more visitors in a month.
• Within 2 years, they were attracting nearly 7x more visitors per month.

On the leads front, the report found similarly exciting results:

• Within 6 months, customers were generating 2x more leads every month.
• Within a year, they were generating 6x more leads ... and they kept on growing.
• After two years, they were generating almost 33x more leads every month. 

Inbound sets our customers up for long term growth and a sustainable business model. Within a few months of starting, they don't have to worry as much about where their next month's leads are coming from -- they're consistently getting more visitors to their website and converting them to leads because of the previous months' work.

Inbound generates revenue, fast.

I'll let the numbers speak for themselves: 69% of customers saw an increase in sales revenue, 74% of which experienced this increase within 7 months of using HubSpot.

Not only did these companies sell more -- but they sold faster. Over 30% of customers reduced their sales cycle since implementing HubSpot ... which isn't surprising considering calls-to-action (CTAs), landing pages, and marketing automation were some of the most popular tools used since starting HubSpot. These tools all help people become leads and customers at a high volume and rate.

And this revenue growth wasn't just limited to certain types of businesses. Over a 2-year period, sales increased relatively consistently across a number of different data segments -- B2B, B2C, US & Canada, and International. Even the growth among HubSpot packages was fairly consistent -- the majority of customers across all product levels agreed that HubSpot helped them grow sales revenue.

What this all means is that even if inbound is a long-term investment, it also can help your business grow pretty quickly -- regardless of what type of business you are. The principles extend across business types and geographic location; I guess people everywhere agree they don't like being interrupted.

These are just a few insights gleaned from our ROI report, but they all tell the same story: HubSpot customers are happily growing their businesses with our software and inbound marketing methodology month after month after month. 

Want to dive into the data yourself? Check out the full ROI report here. 

“Hello, Bridget? It’s Broken Website Bob. I have a problem; I think my website is broken. I can see that people come to my site and they don’t ever contact the sales team. I have this great website and it doesn’t seem to be working. I need your help!”

Your website isn’t generating leads, people are leaving your website soon after the show up, or even worse… no one is coming to your website. Ever. I can feel the frustration or downright sadness over the phone as I work to triage the situation. I hear it often; the stories vary but the theme is always the same.

In this series I’d like to address a few key players in “Reasons Your Website is Broken.” I’ll also go through how to rethink your approach towards the problem and help you come up with a solution.

Scenario 1- “But my website has tons of great content!”

In my mind, you should only attribute the phrase the more the merrier to girl scout cookies and not your website content. It can be extremely challenging to define what your company does. Translating that into your website can be even more difficult (heck, that’s why they hire people to do it).

If I have to read through a bunch of content to understand what your company does, I’m going to give up (and so will your audience, unfortunately). Time and time again I tell my clients to take the less is more approach with their website content. Don’t send me clicking through your homepage to connect the dots on why I should reach out to you, shop with you, or buy from you.

Self diagnosis time

If someone looks at your company homepage and after 10 minutes of browsing asks, “what do you do?” this may be why your website is broken. Here are a few key questions I ask to help get the wheels turning. These questions also provide a great starting point for how you define your business on your homepage:

1. How is your company different?

This one goes along with your value statement. Get it out in the open from the beginning. What does your company do to help your clients? Make sure your audience knows with several impactful sentences what you do and how you help. Cut down on the content clutter and cut straight to the chase. When you ask your audience to read through multiple paragraphs to get to the point, they’ll likely leave your site (and check out the competition).

2. Who is your audience? (you’ve got to speak their language)

Who are you trying to attract to your website? You’re going to need a different tone to your content for a c-suite executive working in oil and gas vs. a generation y- marketer. Writing content for your buyer personas will help guide your content; it can also make sure you are staying on target to reach the right traffic.

3. What do you want to happen?

This sounds pretty simple, but that’s the point; make it simple. Trust me. If you want your audience to sign up for a consultation or read more about your specific services, then make it clear. When you use too many words for the actionable items on your website, people get confused. When you keep in mind what you want the outcome to be, you keep your website more focused on action and clarity and less on heavy text.

Taking a 30,000 foot view of your site can often reveal more than a close inspection. The goal is not to strip all the content off your site (Google has to be able to find you after all). The goal is to write targeted content that tells your story to the right audience and gets them to do the right things.

Telling your message in multiple paragraphs with just slightly different words will not make your business more clear to your audience. On the other hand, it will confuse them and send them navigating away from your url.

So, do you have too much content on your website? What will you do to change it?

Photo Credit: Free Grunge Textures – www.freestock.ca via Compfight cc

Facebook has been around for 10 years now since it launched in 2004. It’s almost hard to remember what life was like pre-Facebook! Now we can update our Facebook status and communicate with all of our friends and family at once, or offer a discount coupon on a Facebook business Fan Page and begin seeing results in minutes.

You’re likely to get into a rut when using your Facebook status update to market your business because you do what comes easy for you. Resist the urge. Evaluate your page’s Insights and see what type of content results in the highest reach and engagements. Facebook provides detailed statistics on your page engagement under the admin panel. Do more of that.

You may need to experiment with some different types of content than you are used to posting on your Fan Page status. It’s more important than ever to post quality content because Facebook has gradually reduced its organic sharing of posts since 2006. On December 5, 2013, it announced that it was changing its algorithm again to “show the right content at the right time,” which meant that even fewer organic posts would be showed.

The number of times your content is viewed is influenced by factors such as the number of likes, shares and comments a post receives from the world at large and from your friends in particular, and how much fans have interacted with this type of post in the past. This means that now you really have to work to get “free” Facebook status update views.

Of course Facebook isn’t saying this, but the obvious reason for the algorithm change is that they’re pushing brands toward its advertising as an alternative way of getting more eyes on posts. The easiest way to promote your Fan Page is through boosted posts. After you have your credit card information logged in, it’s simple to click “boost post” on an individual Facebook status update and get thousands of additional views.

You can either boost the post and allow Facebook to select the audience (“friends of friends”) or get more granular with your audience and drill down by selecting demographics such as cities, ages and various keyword descriptors, such as “small business,” “chamber of commerce” or “medical.”

Several times a month I select particular blog post links I want to boost and spend $30 each to boost my Facebook status updates. Within 24 hours, a boost will results in anywhere from 5,ooo to 10,000 views vs. a couple of dozen organic views. Of those views, I’m likely to get about 20-25 clicks on my link, 30-35 clicks on my post and 5-6 “likes” on the post. Those link clicks have brought me several new leads, so it’s definitely been worth the money.

Try these Facebook status updates

So, what are some different types of Facebook status updates that you might want to try?

1) Questions: You want to engage your fans, and questions are a great way to do that. But don’t just ask general questions, ask questions that relate to your business. One of the best I’ve seen at this is Jim Hicks Home Improvement, who not only uses the technique on his Fan Page, but also on his personal Profile Page. He posts photos of beautiful rooms and then asks questions such as, “What do you like most about this mud room?” and “What’s the best element in this before and after kitchen remodel?” His friends rush to comment on his updates.

2) Content from your website or blog: As I mentioned above, I post a lot of links to my blog posts on Facebook. It’s a great way to promote your blog. But don’t forget about your website, as well. If you’ve got new products, new employees or sales to announce, go ahead and post those, too.

But here’s the caveat. The majority of your Facebook status updates should not be sales-focused information. You should remember the 80/20 rule. About 80 percent of your posts should be helpful information from multiple sources. If you provide helpful or entertaining content most of the time, then your fans will let you get away with the occasional sales-y or promotional status update. Just don’t overdo it.

3) Coupons: Research shows that offering coupons with “$ off” produces twice the engagement of “% off.” Even if the actual dollar amount is small, fans prefer the cash discounts.

4) Facebook status updates that include a single image generate 120 percent more engagement than the average post. A cool way to add photos is to use PicMonkey to add text to your photos before uploading them to make them stand out.

5) Run contests, promotions, drawings or sweepstakes: Until recently, you had to use a third-party app to do this. Facebook changed the rules in August 2013 and began allowing businesses to run their own promotions by changing their page terms. Just be sure you follow the rules to a T. This article explains really well what you can and can’t do.

6) Behind-the-scene-look: This works really well, especially if you are in a “glamour” industry such as media. Show “a-day-in-the life”-type photos and content that usually only employees get to see. A similar type of content is “before-and-after” shots of makeovers — whether you are a hairdresser, dog groomer or a house remodeler.

7) Posts about your favorite charity: Not only is it helpful to the charity, it shows that your business is community minded. You can even combine your Facebook promotion with your social responsibility by challenging the Facebook community to help you reach a certain level of “likes” by a given date, and in response you will make a donation to the charity. For example, if breast cancer awareness is your cause, you might challenge your fans to help you reach 5,000 “likes” by the end of October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and you will give $1 for each “like” you receive.

These are just a few ways to think differently about the content you are sharing on your Facebook status updates. There are many creative communications tools you can integrate into your social media strategy if you plan your approach rather than waiting until the last minute to figure out what you are going to post. The best way to do this is by setting up a content calendar a month at a time so that you’ll know in advance what you are doing from one week to the next. At the end of each month, use your Facebook Insights to analyze what worked, then rinse and repeat.

Your Facebook status updates are just one factor in creating great marketing that people will love. Download our FREE report and we’ll tell you how to use all your social media and your website to the kind of marketing that will attract raving fans that will convert into customers.

Despite the popularity of video, there’s still a common misconception that you can create tons of video content, throw it up on YouTube, and pray to the marketing gods that it attracts attention. However, this kind of wishful thinking is crazy. Video marketing involves more work. It has to be timely, relevant, memorable, and most importantly, optimized if you’re going to see any return on investment.

Just as you optimize landing pages and build full campaigns around a piece of written content to ensure it performs, you have to do the same with videos. In other words, you can’t bank on “going viral,” but you can add some leading-edge customization to video content to make sure it drives business. 

That said, here are five steps to make sure every video you create is fully optimized for maximum performance once it’s released into the wild:

Step 1: Design videos with the goal in mind

Before the concept of a video marketing platform existed, everyone seemed to think a video could only be used for brand awareness. However, a strategic and purposeful video can actually guide leads through the sales funnel and enhance conversion — you just have to align your video’s concept to specific goals right from the start.

To plan a purposeful video, first determine:

• The emotions you want to evoke and why (fear, excitement, and greed are a few that work especially well)
• The target buyer personas to which the video will appeal
• The actions you want your leads to take based on the content they consume

These considerations lead to a more focused, actionable video. For example, if you evoke an emotion such as fear or anxiety (e.g., “Oh no! My current solution doesn’t offer that critical feature!“), you can appeal to the pain points of your audience and get your prospects to take the actions you want (e.g., “Yes, I want to register for the webinar!”)

There are many companies that are doing an especially good job evoking emotion through storytelling for exactly this purpose. One of my favorite examples is Adobe’s Click Baby Click video ad. This video showcases an overzealous CEO of an encyclopedia company getting excited about a massive spike in web traffic and online orders for his product:

As you can see, the end of the narrative cuts to a baby tapping furiously on an iPad, and Adobe cleverly asks, “Do you know what your marketing is doing?” It successfully uses a funny story about misinterpreting data to evoke a fear and imply we’re all missing something if we don’t use the advertised product. This is the kind of emotion you need to drive with purposeful video content.

Step 2: Build calls to action — and a way for leads to follow up

How many times have you reached the end of a product video only to find it fades to black? Although marketers know the importance of a call to action, they seem to be missing from a lot of today’s video content.

Before you release your next video, make sure you have included specific calls to action.

Such CTAs could include:

• A series of YouTube annotations pointing to different resources
• A direct prompt from the video’s host
• A short link at the end of the video directing viewers to a landing page

Some CTA best practices: As an example, when marketing a recent event, we created a video and embedded it on a landing page. Directly beside this eye-catching video we included three different calls to action:

You’ll notice that our CTAs:

1. Prompted event attendees to set up a call
2. Prompted a product walk-through via schedule a demo
3. Prompted viewers to visit our product page to see more related content

This example demonstrates that your CTAs should not only be direct, but they should also include different ways that your buyer personas might want to reach out to you.The point of conversion might not be a demo (the decision maker might not be ready), so use at least two CTAs — one for leads ready to proceed and one leading to more of your persuasive content.

Step 3: Set up a lead-capture method

Another feature that’s moved directly from the written content world into the video content world is the email gate and lead-capture form. Once you have your video ready to go, it’s important to consider including an email gate because these will go wherever your content is shared on social networks, providing a simple way to find out which leads are interested enough to willingly give you their personal information.

Additionally, some video marketing platforms let you build contact forms to include at the end of your videos. Basically, you can collect multiple fields of information in addition to the viewer’s email address.

Here’s an example of what an email gate might look like:

Best practices for video lead capture:

• Use email gates on content that targets users who are lower in the funnel (like highly detailed or lengthy product demos). Because an email gate requires some buy-in from viewers, you’ll want to make sure you’ve warmed leads up with quality un-gated content before asking for their info.
• Don’t use too many fields when setting up an end-of-video contact form — you don’t want to fatigue your potential prospects before they complete your form.

Step 4: Add key information for SEO

SEO can be a tricky beast, in part due to the frequent algorithm updates from Google; but making your videos more search-friendly is easy if you focus on these three things:

1. Keywords and descriptions: Using Google’s Adwords Planner, do some initial research on the words you’d like to rank for within your industry and use those words in a clear phrase format for your video’s title and in your meta descriptions. Choose something people are likely to search for (e.g., “world’s best invoicing and payments software“) instead of something you think sounds clever or catchy (e.g., “payments for pals!“)
2. Transcripts: Because YouTube and Google don’t extract all of the words from your videos, search engines can’t be 100 percent sure of the subject matter in your videos. To help with video SEO, try transcribing your video (or use a service) and turn the video’s accompanying text into a blog post. This way the blog post featuring your video will alert search engines about the context, and Google will qualify your relevant content.
3. Multi-platform promotion: After you have embedded your video on your site, put it up on YouTube and other distribution outlets with a different title. Because YouTube and Google are the two top search engines, you don’t want to cannibalize your SEO efforts, so tweak your content just slightly to take advantage of both.

Step 5: Analyze your performance, and plan future content

The final step to getting the most out of your video content marketing is to take a look at some analytics. If you’re creating lots of videos, you’ll want to consider investing in a video marketing platform that provides access to this detailed data. Interpreting your prospects’ digital behavior is the key to making informed decisions about future content. It’s only by analyzing who is watching specific videos, and for how long, that you’ll see which topics are resonating, and you’ll start to understand ways to modify your content strategy based on how your content typically performs.

For example, one of the best metrics to track is your average lead’s attention span. If you notice that prospects are dropping off 10 seconds into your videos, this could signify that that your intros may be too long, and so you might want to try trimming them down and getting to the main discussion more quickly.

Overall, valuable video marketing data is able to show you whether your leads are truly engaged, and which parts of your content strategy need work based on your audience’s digital behavior.

So try the optimization process

Next time you send your videos off to their various destinations, try implementing each of these five steps. By streamlining the process you use to make effective use of your content for lead capture, sales enablement, SEO, and measurement, you’ll notice a dramatic difference in how video performs throughout the buying cycle.

For more great tips for creating more engaging video content, read “Epic Content Marketing,” by Joe Pulizzi.

Revenue Marketing™ in the Enterprise does not happen overnight. I know, I know… I burst your bubble, right? Many companies expect instant global revenue impact by simply purchasing a marketing automation platform.

The problem is, driving and measuring change in the Enterprise is like finding meaning in a Will Ferrell movie – it’s a challenge!

Here at The Pedowitz Group, we maintain that for a global Enterprise, a mature Revenue Marketing Center of Excellence takes several years (at least) to establish. And while the #1 metric for Revenue Marketing is and always will be revenue impact, there are vital “signs of transformation” along the way that are important to measure and celebrate.

How do you know if your company is transforming into a global Revenue Marketing Center of Excellence?

Below are 7 Signs of RM Transformation:

1. Executive Sponsorship and Support for Revenue Marketing

True change happens from the top down. Any efforts at implementing Revenue Marketing strategies at a large company will hit a ceiling if there is not buy-in, commitment and joint vision at the executive level. The most successful global RM transformations we see here at TPG are those where the change is driven by the executives, who have the “Revenue Marketing Fever” and use it to drive their teams’ annual goals and direction. Even better is the guiding power of an Executive Revenue Marketing Coalition.

2. Key Marketing Metrics and Goals are Revenue-Focused

How an organization measures success (and therefore sets goals) is extremely important. Before you are able to identify actual marketing impact on revenue and forecast it, changes to the type of metrics you measure are crucial. Most enterprise organizations measure marketing impact by number of raw leads handed to sales, click throughs, open rates, etc. The problem here is that these metrics all have zero connection with revenue – they’re all activity-based. A traditionally “successful” marketing organization could technically generate thousands of leads a year, yet have sales accept none of them because they are not actually qualified (I see this often, sadly). If your company is setting marketing goals and success metrics by lead-to-opportunity and lead-to-booked, you’re on the right track. If your company is compensating marketers based on their actual sales contributions, you’re ahead of the game.

3. Key Business Processes Remapped Around Revenue Marketing Strategy

Process and planning drive effective activity. Often, enterprise companies forget this and, as a result, find their hard work at Revenue Marketing confounded by broken processes. As we always say – a new methodology or tool will just make bad processes worse! I once had a client who spent many months planning an amazing multi-step nurture campaign. However, they refused to re-map how leads are handed off to sales and then measured (i.e. the full lifecycle of the lead). After the campaign had run its full course, and had successfully rendered many marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to sales, they realized that none were followed up on and no one could report on “what happened.” So, if your company is re-mapping key business processes (lead flow, sales acceptance/feedback, etc.) and operationalizing standard inter-departmental interactions (Marketing Programs, Design, Marcom, Product, Sales) around Revenue Marketing, you are laying the foundation for success.

4. Technology Platforms Adapted to Revenue Marketing

Let’s get real here – in most enterprises, technology platforms are a source of pain. Often, they are owned by departments completely removed from the business unit they support (insert IT/Marketing clash here). A vital mark of transformation is if Revenue Marketing processes are being reflected in platform configurations. This could be global assignment rules and reporting changes in the CRM, an expanded global instance of the marketing automation platform, or RM-optimized websites. If your organization has overcome this hurdle, you should pop the bubbly.

5. Hiring Around Revenue Marketing

Adding permanent team resources (like VP Revenue Marketing, Content Developers, Strategic Campaign Managers, Marketing Automation Power Users, etc.) to execute and measure your growing Revenue Marketing efforts signifies an organizational commitment to building a Revenue Marketing Center of Excellence. So, if you’ve aligned your headcount strategy around key Revenue Marketing skills and functions, you can be sure transformation is taking place.

6. Increased Revenue Marketing Budget

Budgets tell all. The percentage of budget allocated to specific departments and initiatives in the Enterprise directly reflects an organization’s commitment to that area. If your organization is increasing or reallocating its marketing and sales dollars around Revenue Marketing initiatives, you are transforming into a Revenue Marketing Center of Excellence. If your sales VP is going to bat for marketing budget increases, then congratulations – you’ve really arrived.

7. Adoption of Revenue Marketing “Speak”

Juicy words spread in any work environment. But if you find marketing employees hanging around the water cooler talking about “revenue marketing,“ “customer-led buying processes,” or “MQL-to-Closed/Won conversion rates,” it’s a sign that Revenue Marketing concepts and culture are going viral in your organization. The other day, I was sitting across a conference room table from the SVP of Demand Generation at a large Silicon Valley enterprise. He shared with my team that he keeps getting emails from leaders all over the global organization titled “Revenue Marketing?”… the Revenue Marketing fever is spreading there!

Have you seen any of these signs in your Revenue Marketing Journey?

Did you know that the average consumer is exposed to 5,000 marketing messages each day (CBS)? To deal with this information overload, consumers are tuning out left and right: the average CTR for display ads is a mere .1% (HubSpot), average cold call success rates are about 2% at best (Marketing Success), and email CTR is at a dismal 3% in the US (SilverPop).

Let’s face it – in an age where your customers have more options than there are minutes in the day, the last thing they want to hear is another sales pitch. Too many businesses lose sight of the fact that on the other ends of these marketing messages are people. And connecting with these people on a 1:1 level, whether they are searching for a new customer database or pair of shoes, is far more effective than blasting them with generic mass messages.

Social networks give businesses the opportunity to connect closer with current and prospective customers on deeper and more personal levels at each point in the purchase funnel, effectively boosting conversion rates and lifetime customer value. Here are three ways to leverage social marketing to move from a selling approach to a connecting approach.

It’s all about who you know.

Social media is often thought of as a B2C marketing channel, but more and more B2B companies are discovering the value of social networks. Recent studies show that 84% of decision makers at B2B companies begin their buying process with referrals, and that over 78% of salespeople who use social media outsell their peers who do not (Social Media and Sales Quota Report).

Sales teams that leverage their individual social connections stand a greater chance of getting a “foot in the door” with potential clients and staying top of mind during the vetting process. Not to mention, paying attention to clients’ social activity presents opportunities to find meaningful conversation starters and common points of interest that help you stand out from the pack.

To Do: Make sure that your company has a system in place for identifying, tracking and leveraging employees’ social relationships, and implement a strategy for sales to connect and engage with clients and prospects across professional networks like LinkedIn.

Let your customers sell for you.

Customer reviews are trusted 12x more than descriptions that come from manufacturers (Brick Marketing). It’s no surprise that the fastest way to stand out from the crowd and get the attention of new customers is through word-of-mouth, and social networks are the perfect platform to spread awareness and let your customers do the selling for you.

81% of people say that posts by friends on social media influence their purchase decisions (Forbes), and marketers that maximize their social presence across networks will reap the benefits. However, simply updating your Facebook page with your latest company release isn’t enough. Successful brands are making their sites and apps inherently social, incorporating users’ social connections into on-site experiences and allowing them to move seamlessly back and forth between their web properties and social networks.

To Do: Update your site or app with social sharing buttons for a number of networks so that consumers can share their favorite content and features with the click of a button. Be sure to provide plenty of opportunities for clients to leave feedback via on-site comments and reviews, and make these sharable as well.

Know what they need, when they need it.

Just imagine: you’re a single mother of three living in Southern California, and Daily Deal Site A sends you an offer for a romantic Napa getaway for two. Now, imagine you receive a voucher for free admission and lunch at the newest local amusement park from Daily Deal Site B. Which voucher would you be most likely to purchase, and which site’s emails would you be more likely to open in the future?

Smart brands go above and beyond the one-size-fits-all campaign approach to provide customers with the most timely and relevant user experiences possible. Showing your customers that you know and care about who they are, whether it’s greeting them by name when they login or tailoring product showcases to their personal needs and interests, is the key to establishing meaningful customer relationships that drive conversions. Leads who are nurtured with targeted content produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities (DemandGen).

To Do: Implement a flexible, robust database that seamlessly collects and aggregates consumer data to build complete, accurate user profiles. Make sure the database integrates with your current marketing platforms to enable more relevant and timely consumer experiences across channels and devices.

Transitioning from selling to connecting is not easy – it takes time, insight, strategy, and the right tools. But with the power of social networks, building personal, 1:1 relationships with buyers and consumers has never been more possible, and in the age of the connected consumer, it’s never been more necessary.

Creating and marketing valuable, relevant, and engaging online content requires time, patience, and commitment.  We have all heard about the value of high search engine rankings. However, there is something more important that search engine optimization – that is, audience optimization.  You are probably wondering, how does content marketing optimize your online audience?

Content is Only as Powerful as the Audience You Build with It

Your company’s online presence is made up of a content website, blog, and social media.  Your blog becomes an extension of your brand’s website by creating value both for your company and the readers.  An effective online presence is based on building relationships with an audience who is interested in your content.  Good content marketers use content marketing to drive not only traffic, but also engagement, loyalty and eventually brand advocacy.  The key is learning how to convert an online audience into marketing qualified leads, then into sales qualified leads, then into customers, and ultimately into brand advocates.  Content is only as powerful as the audience you build it for, if you can attract the right people to the right content at the right time.  People are more likely to buy your products and services because you deliver relevant content to them. Once your audience sees the value in your content, they will associate that value with your brand.

Content Marketing Leads to Trustworthy, Long-term Relationships

What most marketers do not realize is that you cannot buy a customer list; instead, you earn and build a customer list.  The secret to success is earning long-term customer loyalty and trust, which will ultimately lead to repeat purchases and referrals.  Focusing on the long-term gains by avoiding shortcuts will lead to long-lasting success. People do business with individuals who they know, like, and trust.  Before making the buying decision, prospective buyers have already gathered information about your products and services, searched for peer recommendations and reviews, and compared you to your competitors. Prospective customers want to learn and get answers to their questions – they do not want to hear a sales pitch. How you approach and engage the prospect is more important than what you are trying to sell.  As a content marketer, you connect with the prospect as an educated and trusted advisor, not a salesman.

Content Marketing Traffic is Qualified and Engaged

Traffic from content marketing engages a more qualified audience who is actively searching for the information you are sharing.  You can build a profitable audience through customer-focused content as well as social media exposure and sharing.  Education-forward marketing enhances the sales experience without the prospective customers even realizing that you are building a relationship with them.  Prospects are looking for answers from an authority figure, and content marketing makes your brand the expert resource for a specific topic or field.  While advertising often feels like a manipulative sales pitch, content marketing feels more educational, authentic, and objective.

Research proves that effective content marketing results in a lower cost-per-lead to acquire new customers. This is less expensive and more rewarding than advertising because you have the ability to reach a more engaged audience and to build long-term connections with marketing and sales qualified leads.

Content Marketing Strategy is a Connected Triangle of Content, Social Media, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Content development, social media, and SEO work together, not separately, to achieve effective content marketing.  Website content should educate your audience, address their questions, and enhance their lives by offering effective solutions.  Social media engagement enables users to share content on social networks and link from their own blogs and websites. This signals to search engines that your content is relevant and of high quality.  Content relevance leads to high search ranking because you are providing the right content to the right people at the right time.  Consistent messaging between online platforms, such as your website, social media, and blog, is vital in order to achieve successful content marketing and a cohesive brand identity.

Gain a competitive advantage by using content marketing to optimize your online audience. Driving traffic to your website does not guarantee an immediate increase in sales. However, converting search traffic into qualified leads will improve your ability to build long-term relationships with prospective customers.  Creating and marketing your website’s valuable content requires a significant amount of effort, creativity, and skills. To learn how to create content that drives traffic to your website to convert leads into customers, check out our guide below.

Launched in 2006,  Salesforce’s AppExchange predates Apple’s App Store by two years and has become one of the largest enterprise app marketplaces with over 2.2 million installs from  2,100 apps (44% free and 56% paid), according to the AppExchange homepage.

Unfortunately, usage statistics are not published, so rather I proxied popularity from the number of reviews. In addition, I also looked at those apps rate 4 stars or higher (out of 5). Not surprisingly, marketing automation software is among the most popular with Hubspot having more than twice the reviews of any other marketing application. Here’s the full list:

Hubspot (531 reviews)
Attract visitors, convert them into leads, and turn your leads into delighted customers. HubSpot’s software includes all the tools you need to do inbound marketing, plus award winning services and support to help companies master inbound marketing.

Genius Pro Marketer (223 reviews)
Genius provides marketing automation, demand generation and email marketing solutions designed to meet the needs of both Sales and Marketing. Marketing manages the campaigns, while Sales reps receive real-time engagement alerts to the hottest leads!

iContact (151 reviews)
iContact for Salesforce lets you send personalized, mass messages using custom fields you have created in Salesforce. Simply build your email marketing templates in Salesforce with the merge fields you need, and let iContact validate the merge fields and send your messages.

Act-On (127 reviews)
Act-On’s marketing automation platform provides a seamless integration with Salesforce. Marketers generate, qualify and score leads from multiple channels and sync with Salesforce.

Manticore (121 reviews)
Powerful, yet easy-to-use marketing automation including email & landing page design wizard, lead scoring, automated lead nurturing programs, visitor tracking, & unmatched Salesforce.com integration.

Bizible (92 reviews)
Track the marketing sources of your leads, from AdWords to social to email, so you can close the loop between online marketing and revenue to optimize marketing by ROI. Replicate your best leads and close more deals by surfacing detailed visitor behavior and information to sales.

Pardot (90 reviews)
Pardot helps sales and marketing departments team up to maximize efficiency and increase revenue. With Pardot’s easy-to-use marketing automation suite, you can automatically track, score, and nurture prospects throughout the sales cycle.

Bridgemail (39 reviews)
Bridgemail System is an advanced email marketing tool that allows users to seamlessly execute email marketing campaigns. The platform is equipped with marketing automation for lead scoring, lead nurturing, alerts, and 100% customizable analytics.

Campaign Calendar (38 reviews)
Campaign Calendar makes working with your Salesforce Campaigns even better by generating an interactive Marketing calendar inside your Salesforce instance. The Campaign Calendar gives you a single place to schedule, review and execute your marketing efforts, and because it “lives” in Salesforce it’s simple to share it with the rest of the company.

What are your favorite apps in the AppExchange?

Do you know the contact form? Yes, that plain, simple contact form on websites. Well, there’s more to it than being just a “plain, simple” way of contact. In fact, things are quite the opposite – it can do a lot more for you and it does not, by all means, have to be plain or simple.

I’m sure you’re very familiar with the contact form. You probably see it more than once a day on the websites you enter. And still, under these circumstances, at some point, 65% of small business websites didn’t have a form based way of contact, which visitors could use to send inquiries.

The preferences for including an email address on your website as a way of contact, or using a form for the same purpose, are generally divided. Website owners preferring to put an email address at their visitors’ disposal claim that it’s a solution that allows the visitors to have a copy of the message they’ve sent. This is partly true, since you can use a form and opt for including a copy of the submitted answers in the autoresponder and let your visitors know you eliminated this inconvenience. Nevertheless, there are some reasons which can’t undermine the advantage of using a contact form.

1. A contact form fulfills a triple role, allowing visitors to: a) ask general questions, b) send specific product/service related inquiries, and c) offer you feedback. As of the way you offer these options, you can either use a general message box, like when the visitor would write an email, or you can insert a multiple-choice selection of the message topic, so that it’s easier to sort out the received inquiries.
2. It’s an on-site contact method, meaning you don’t send your visitor to an email client, if they want to ask or to share something with you. This might in some cases lower bounce rates, since the visitor doesn’t have to leave the site.
3. A form helps you fight spam. Compared to publicly showing an email address on your site, the form can significantly reduce the amount of spam. Use captcha codes in order to do so, and even limit the number of submissions from the same IP, if you consider it benefits you. Real life cases of replacing the email address with a form point to a spam-lowering context.
4. It lets you decide what to ask. No matter if Name, Email, Message – you decide what and how many fields to include in your form. There’s one thing to keep in mind, though – the fewer fields you have, the higher the conversion/completion rate. Including too many fields or ones which require sensitive information acts like a scare off, driving people away from your site.
5. You can opt to include and display completion guidance text. That means you can elaborate the idea from the field labels, offering supplementary information on what the visitor should fill out, without the labels looking crowded because of too long text. Shaping a better description on the desired information can spare the visitor time, help them understand your idea, convince them to go all the way with submitting the form. Plus, it provides you with more accurate answers.
6. Required information can be marked as such. That is, for data that you absolutely need, you may set the field value to required, not allowing the user to submit the form without that particular information piece. Though, required fields should be used carefully, because they have the potential to discourage the visitor from filling out the form, especially if the required data is sensitive.
7. The contact form can be a great source of lead gathering. As visitors fill in their names, maybe their email addresses and perhaps additional information like their area of interest, they can be added to a database and you can follow up on them when you think it’s relevant (they can be offered a special deal based on their interests, on holiday sales or on their buying patterns). Several form builders are integrated with popular 3rd party apps such as CRMs, that allow automatical add to contact lists with every form submission. From the CRM, you can choose how to further proceed with the contacts – send them newsletters if they wish to, offer them special deals or follow up if they are undecided in purchasing your product or service.
8. You have advanced customization options. From the form theme, logo, colors, images, up to conditional logic (field and form rules), email notifications, custom autoresponders and thank you page – everything can be changed and set to best match your needs. Form branding leads to visitors better identifying your company/brand, while preference customization helps you with the form workflow and its interaction with the visitor after the actual submission.
9. Advanced data handling options are available for empowering a clear overview of the submissions. Reports and charts are there to sum up the form data and categorise it properly, so it’s easier to read and maintain in sight. Visual elements such as graphs can show you, for example, the number of submissions from a specific time span, in order for you to know when the inquiries were more crowded.
10. You can find a form builder like 123ContactForm that doesn’t require any coding skills. Such form builders have a drag and drop editor where you can build any type of form for your small business use, including the mentioned contact form, which you can customize for your needs.

To draw a conclusion, every website owner has to decide if they want to display an email address or use a contact form as the main way of communication with the visitors. This has to be done considering the advantages of each of the two options, keeping in mind that a contact form has a good number of strengths to offer.

Image courtesy of 123ContactForm

Social selling has grown as smart sales people learned how to leverage their online networks to promote sales. However, this “bottom-up” approach is not sustainable. Without standards, training, and management – your company’s brand and sales process is whatever each individual sales rep decides it is. That is why I am demonstrating 10 ways for sales managers to actually manage social selling on a webinar Feb. 19. I will demonstrate how sales managers can help their team leverage social selling. Here is a sneak-peek at the 10 areas:

1. Do all your sales reps have a LinkedIn account? See the fastest way to find out.

2. Do they all have a business appropriate head shot as their LinkedIn photo? You won’t believe some of the photos you’ll see.

3. Do they have a LinkedIn headline that attracts buyers with customer-oriented benefits? Their title is not good enough. See some great ones.

4. How many LinkedIn Connections does each sales rep have? 400 is the recommended minimum for a full-time B2B Sales hunter responsible for generating most of their own leads.

5. Are all your sales reps connected to you on LinkedIn? How else can they leverage your connections built over the years?

6. How many Groups does each sales rep belong to? The maximum is 50? Are your reps in the right ones?

7. Do an audit search of their Connections for ideal prospects. Searching a Connection’s Connections is a new feature LinkedIn released last year.

8. Are they regularly posting valuable information to their network? Is tougher than ever to figure out since LinkedIn dropped Signals and Activities.

9. If your sales team uses the premium Sales Navigator version of LinkedIn, are you using the management reports to monitor Views, Searches, and InMails sent?

10. Are your sales reps getting more appointments from social selling? Include social apps as lead sources in your CRM to track lead counts and sales conversion ratios.

Want to see these in action? Register for the Feb. 19 webinar “Managing a Social Selling Team – 10 Tips for Sales Managers”.

Historically, marketing departments have been forced to work at the pace of the rest of the organization they serve. In fact, their needs often get bumped down the priority list by other business needs and wants. For decades, moving at the pace dictated by the rest of the business was just fine. But now it’s not. Because the audience is moving really fast, and your marketing needs to meet that speed. This is a problem for most organizations.

Embracing content marketing is, arguably, the best way to build trust with the audience.  The audience – i.e., everyone you know – is searching for good information on the Internet. The entity that delivers it to them is going to build trust as a reliable, credible source. Your organization can be this entity, if you embrace a content strategy.

However, before you can start to build trust with the audience, you need to build trust with the big dogs in the C-suite. Because you can’t win the game if the folks upstairs won’t let you run free.

In other words, you need complete buy-in from the C-suite. If you don’t get it, it will inhibit your success. Because most C-levels folks have risen to that level by selling, and selling hard. Their muscle memory defaults to selling, and if a lack of trust in the concept of content marketing easily leads to a lack of patience.

Here’s a true story from the front lines: We just concluded a client relationship because we could not retrain the executives’ muscle memory. Their default thinking was always to sell sell sell.  Try as we might, they were not interested in audience-focused content. We – I – failed to convince them that focusing on a bigger conversation would pay dividends.

So how do you earn the trust of the C-suite when you’re first launching a content strategy? Here are some ideas on earning the trust of the decision makers upstairs:

Be clear from the outset.  It’s important that the decision makers understand that this is something completely different from everything they’ve done in the past, and that it will take six to 12 months to see real traction. They’ll have to be patient. They’ll be seeing content that talks about competitors and does not have an overt sales message. They won’t get it and they’ll have their doubts. You need to tell them all of this before you start, and then you need to over-communicate as the effort progresses.

Speak their language (but do so honestly). You can’t have a “let’s put on a show” mentality. This effort needs to be business-focused, and the presentation to the C-suite should focus on what it will do for the business. Talk about audience growth, engagement and, importantly, how that will lead to sales. Showcase examples from similar industries.

Be metric focused. In all likelihood, the C-suiters will not be writers and journalists. They don’t need to know how you’re going to execute this strategy; rather, they need to know what it will do for the good of their business. Focus on numbers that demonstrate audience growth and engagement. Track the audience as it moves through the sales funnel. Frequent numbers-oriented updates will help you maintain credibility and keep the content strategy on track.

Keep top-level goals front and center. You should not get down in the weeds of content creation and distribution when talking to the folks upstairs. They want to know how it’s going to move the business needle; they don’t need an advanced education on newsgathering.

Focus on awesome quality that will make them proud. Most executives will get it when they see you produce content that is awesome, whether it’s an infographic that goes viral or a fantastic long form piece that makes the light bulb go off for them. Dare to be great.

In the end, trust is the central issue. Would-be content marketers need to make a case for content in which the CEO, CFO and other top-level decision can believe.  The head of the content effort needs to being credibility to the table, needs to build trust, and needs to show demonstrable progress.

It isn’t easy within a skeptical business structure. And it’s impossible if you don’t start with a baseline of trust.

The pace of modern life is faster than ever, and social media seems to evolve at the speed of light.  If you are like most business owners and marketers, your life is fast-paced and always busy.  Because your available time is finite, it is crucial to invest in your social media presence in ways that will yield the greatest ROI.  The social media landscape can change dramatically in a relatively short period of time.  To excel at social media marketing, you need the latest, most relevant data at your fingertips to make informed decisions and create captivating, information-rich content.  Jeff Bullas recently published statistics that provide valuable snapshots of current social media trends, which I will share and discuss now.

Big-Picture Statistics

Social media use is now widespread, mainstream, and more influential than ever.  With social signals increasingly influencing search rankings, expanding and enhancing your social media presence can significantly amplify your reach and rate of lead generation.

• 72% of all Internet users are now active on social media

• 89% of those between 18 and 29 years old are social media users

• 72% of individuals aged 30 to 49 are engaged in social media

• 60% of people between 50 to 60 years old are active on social media

• 43% of those 65 years old and above are engaged in social media

• 71% of users access social media from a mobile device

Facebook Statistics

Many prospects may not even take a company seriously, if it does not have a presence on Facebook.  Sharing captivating, relevant and information-rich content—full of deep industry insight and valuable solutions—on your Brand Page is the primary way to increase traffic and leads to your website via Facebook.  Although Facebook still dominates in terms of sheer size and rate of social sharing, Twitter and Google+ may very well be nipping at Facebook’s heels in 2014.

• Facebook now has over 1.15 billion users

• One million webpages can be accessed with the “Login with Facebook” feature

• 23% of Facebook users login at least 5 times daily

• 47% of Americans say Facebook is the top influencer of their buying decisions

• On average, Americans spend %16 of each online hour on Facebook.

• 70% of marketers acquire new customers through Facebook

Twitter Statistics

As the fastest growing social network, Twitter can seriously impact your business.  Twitter now captures the power of images and video—making it even more influential.  Strategic use of Twitter can significantly enhance social engagement, amplify brand exposure, increase lead generation, help you gain status as an industry thought leader, and achieve more new business.

• Twitter now has over 550 million registered users and 215 million monthly active users

• Between 2012 and 2014, Twitter achieved a growth rate of 44%

• 34% of marketers use Twitter for lead generation

Google+ Statistics

Google+ is the social network powered by Google—the most influential and important search engine around.  When Google changes its search algorithms, marketers, content creators and any company with a website should take notice and update their content and SEO strategies accordingly.  Google+ is all the more powerful due to its increasing influence on search rankings with the social signals of +1s and AuthorRank.  With only three years on the social media scene, Google+ has made a huge impact and changed the nature of content marketing.

• Google+ now has over 1 billion enabled accounts and 359 million active monthly users

• Google+ is has a growth rate of 33% per year

• People aged 45 to 54 years old have increased their Google+ usage by 56% since 2012

Visual Social Media Statistics

Visual media is becoming more influential across all social networks, and social networks devoted solely to images or video, such as Pinterest, YouTube and Instagram, are primed to reach new heights in 2014.

• YouTube has over one billion monthly active users

• Pinterest has 20 million monthly active users

• Instagram has 150 million monthly active users

Use these statistics to help you make informed decisions about how to invest your social media capital in 2014.  Social media can incite serious marketing and sales results.  However, real social media success happens, when your social media presence works in concert with your content creation, email marketing, CTAs and strategic website design.  Each facet of your marketing counts and influences the others.  A complete inbound marketing strategy can address all your marketing needs—helping you realize real social media and business success.

LinkedIn Sponsored Updates have owned the B2B social advertising primarily due to the industry’s comfort level with the social platform. That isn’t to say it doesn’t provide fantastic targeting options, such as the ability to target based on industry, seniority and job function. But another traditionally B2C social platform is slowly gaining headway in the B2B advertising space. Twitter, while slow to implement advertising on its site, is becoming worth the wait.

Last month, we ran two separate advertisements on LinkedIn and Twitter promoting the same piece of content. This was our first attempt at running both simultaneously and the results surprised us.

Audience

For this content offer, we were targeting B2B marketing professionals in the United States. Pretty broad but since the white paper focused on content marketing, we also wanted to include keywords related to that topic.

LinkedIn

We set our audience targeting similar to most of our previous campaigns, adding content marketing specific keywords to the “skills” section. After running the campaign for a full week, LinkedIn provided us the following results:

50 clicks over the course of a week to an audience size of a little over 410,000 is a successful campaign for us. For our company, the leads we generate from one advertisement is quality over quantity, and if 10% of these conversions are valuable prospective customers then this ad did its job. Here is our evaluation:

After reviewing that week, we discovered that of the 50 clicks to the LinkedIn, only two downloads occurred from that source. Bummer. We’ve certainly had more successful ads run on LinkedIn, and one can debate that the content, ad copy and/or targeting keywords used could be modified to increase conversion. Regardless, this was a pretty low conversion rate, which rarely happens in our LinkedIn advertising experience.

Twitter

As a newbie to Twitter advertising, we established some common keywords we thought the Twittersphere would be searching for—heavy on the B2B slant to avoid drawing too many unqualified prospects.

Because promoted tweets was a new tactic, we set the campaign to only run for four days just to manage performance. Twitter provided the following analytics:

This is when a conversion tracking tool – such as VisiStat, Google Analytics or Twitter’s own conversion tracking – comes in handy. Since Twitter users have a multitude of ways to interact with a tweet (e.g. clicking the Twitter profile, retweets, replies, tweet expands, etc.), Twitter charges “per engagement” rather than “per click.” While difficult to track, cost per engagement is relatively low. The ad overall received an engagement rate of 2.42%, which falls within Twitter’s recommended success range of 1 – 3%.

After pulling data from our conversion tracking tool, we discovered even better news:

Once all the “engagements” were filtered out to valuable clicks, we found the Twitter ad brought a total of 22 clicks to the landing page over the course of the four days. Of the 22 clicks, 14 of those visitors downloaded our guide. Even better, almost half of the clicks were valuable prospective contacts for our sales funnel. Pretty impressive for an ad that only ran four days.

At the end of the day, LinkedIn will still prove to bring valuable connections to grow our business. But for B2B companies hesitant to start similar advertising on Twitter due to B2C concerns, you’re missing out on an untapped audience.

We're at an inflection point in B2B marketing, and marketers should celebrate the opportunity to show their true contribution to revenue and not fall back on squishy metrics like 'attention'.

Last week the esteemed Top Sales World blog published a piece entitled, “Attention (not leads) should be B2B marketing’s primary measure”.

I couldn’t disagree more. And, since the post doesn’t include a way to comment, I couldn’t disagree on the page itself, so I’ll do it here.

First, it starts with a very weak definition of a lead:

But leads alone don’t tell the whole story.  So you generated a ‘lead’. So what? They downloaded your white paper. Who cares?

I agree: who cares> Because a form complete or a white paper download or a person watching a webinar does not a lead make. That’s a contact.

A 'lead' is what sales and marketing have jointly agreed is a lead. And that includes creating a lead scoring system and qualifying the people who fill out forms by company (size, industry) and title, behavior on the website, etc.

A lead needs to be called and confirmed verbally to be truly qualified. (My favorite story in this regard comes from the head of demand generation at a mid-market tech company who told me about a download form that was completed by a VP who had budget and authority and wanted to move quickly, but when they called she turned out to be a 12-year-old girl.)

The piece goes on to say:

Let’s say that same prospect, who has never filled out one of your forms, reads your blog 2-3 times a week. They follow and periodically read your CEO’s Twitter feed. That attention has value. It means you’ve already accelerated the awareness and mindshare game.

It may have value, someday, or may not. (Ask the CEO if she cares.) I’ve witnessed contacts coming back to read a company’s blog week after week for years. They value the insights, but they have no need for the product or service. Maybe some year they will, but that’s far from certain, and even farther from being an opportunity.

As one start-up CEO said to me, “I’ve spent a million dollars building our brand. Now I’d like to see some leads.”

To argue the opposite is close to the position of early web entrepreneurs who claimed that aggregating 'eyeballs' was sufficient. Those businesses are now out of business. It’s only the businesses that found a way to monetize that attention, to convert those contacts into customers, that survived.

As the post goes on, it does qualify that absolutist headline, for example, by acknowledging the importance of lead scoring.

But what the post fundamentally misses is that we are at an inflection point in marketing. The old adage -- “I know that half of my marketing is ineffective, I just don’t know which half” – is no longer acceptable.

Marketing is being held to a higher standard and, increasingly is being measured by its contribution to sales and revenue. 'Opportunities generated' is a common B2B metric now.

And marketers should embrace that enthusiastically. In the past, marketing was in a 'last hired, first fired' position whenever there was a downturn or money at the company was tight.

Marketing will only be truly valued to the degree that it’s able to quantify its contribution to revenue in a way that the C-suite acknowledges.

So building the brand, and “attention”, does have value. And a sophisticated attribution model can measure it. But in 2014, leads and opportunities are the primary measure for B2B marketing.

A version of this post originally appeared on the Opinion section of Inbound Hub. To read more content like this, subscribe to Opinion here.

Marketing is hard. But the problem is that too many people think it isn’t. Especially with all the new, “magic bullet” technologies out there that pretty much do everything for you. So where are the results? Why, asks your CEO, did we miss our numbers again?

The fundamental challenge of marketing is that there are a zillion moving parts, give or take, courtesy of a shape-shifting buyer who makes Jell-O look like bedrock. The buyer's journey, which is most often defined as an orderly march down a funnel-shaped thing, is more often beset by a range of shiny objects, conflicting egos, power grabs, FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt), budget shifts, priority shifts, urgent and important fires to extinguish, as well as various other threats to goals and timelines that show up daily in our businesses. In short, stuff happens.

So if that’s all true, if buyers cannot be relied upon to respect the very deliberate path we set out before them, what can we do to improve our conversion rates from prospects to leads and leads to customers? We can start by better understanding the Math of the Besieged Buyer that looks something like this:

The chart above comes from something I call the Rule of 30-20-10. This rule is a simplified version of several “rules” from the world of direct response that have proven very robust over the decades (including current times) when it comes to predicting how buyers behave. (If you want to dig deeper, see Rule of 45, and the Advertising Research Foundation studies via Bob Stone.) 

There’s a certain instinctive truth to the above chart. Of course, it’s not perfectly predictive, but it does provide good directional information to create some context around this discussion.

So we run a series of campaigns, and what happens? Taking our Math of the Besieged Buyer one step further, we might get:    

If you consider the number of “wins” on the bottom line, you get an eye-opening look at the slippage that can occur in any marketing system. Importantly, it’s not the software you may or may not be using that causes the majority of this slippage. As discussed in an earlier post, it’s the work that you put in prior to going to market.

Patience Is a Virtue, Even in Marketing

I was speaking with a colleague this week who has carved out a very successful marketing automation consultancy. He deals with all sizes of company, up to the very large and, presumably, sophisticated. The common feature that continues to amaze him is how impatient marketing organizations are. “Get it out” consistently trumps “do it right." Everyone is looking for shortcuts, and few are putting in the critical thinking that addresses the kinds of slippage observed above.

Precision targeting often falls victim to “buy a large list and blast it" [note 1 above]. The breakthrough that comes from a well-conceived and tested value proposition is more often lacking than not [note 2 above]. The buyer consideration that results from offers that are constructed from truly compelling content is almost always in severe deficit [note 3 above].

The usual suspects of marketing slippage -- targeting, value proposition, and offer strategy -- continue to be shortchanged by marketers who are consumed by the delicious intricacies of execution at the expense of the hard work of thoughtful strategy.

Marketing is hard. But it’s made even more so when we forget that in-the-trenches patience and persistence will always score more touchdowns on the marketing gridiron (ugh) than ivory-tower hunches and hubris.

Drew Williams is a serial marketing entrepreneur and co-author of Feed the Startup Beast: A 7 Step Guide to Big, Hairy, Outrageous Sales Growth (McGraw-Hill 2013). Drew shares his beast-building ideas at FeedTheBeast.biz/blog and @FeedYourBeast.

Are you a B2B marketer who needs to make big improvements fast and are overwhelmed at all the options? Don’t be. Focus on these 5 areas and you’ll be a winner in no time.

There is an apocryphal Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.” If you are a modern B2B marketer, it’s hard not to feel that way.

Thanks to the Internet, the way people buy has changed dramatically in these interesting times. Based on a Corporate Executive Board study, B2B buyers are at least 57% through their buyer journey before they first contact the seller. Other studies estimate that percentage even higher.

And with changes in the way people buy, that changes how products must be marketed.

Fading fast are the days of powerful, interruptive, outbound marketing tactics like advertising, cold calling and direct mail. With every passing month, your prospects can tune out more and more unsolicited, uninterested marketing messages. Even yours.

Now, companies are trying to insert themselves into that first 57% of the buyer journey that takes place without direct contact.

There is a jumble of new marketing tactics that are available and many companies are not sure how to get started. Some companies are flummoxed and in a state of marketing paralysis about how to get started.

It’s as if companies feel like they are pinned down in a marketing firefight, mindful of the need to move forward and take ground but not sure where to go.

Don’t worry. To borrow the U.S. Army Infantry slogan, “Follow me!” and focus on these five areas of B2B marketing for fast results:

1. Develop Buyer Personas. Before investing any more money in your marketing, step back and do a bit of research into who your buyer personas really are.

In Adele Revella’s “The Buyer Persona Manifesto,” she offers this definition of a buyer persona:

“It’s an archetype, a composite picture of the real people who buy, or might buy, products like the ones you sell.”

Buyer personas are like an avatar crafted from direct interviews with as many buyers as possible. And from their behavior observed at conferences, social media, etc.

Other characters who influence the buyer’s decision-making process will emerge from this research: procurement people, bosses, rivals, etc.

It’s important to remember that this buyer persona is not necessarily your customer. The development of the persona helps you discern the difference between who you THINK your customer is versus who you real customer is. Flowing from that is a wealth of strategic insights about not only who your customer is, but also how to talk to them.

2. Create Remarkable Content. The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as “… a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

One of the few things your prospects might find of interest about you while they are researching a purchase is your content. But there’s a catch. Your content needs to be remarkable, educational, entertaining or otherwise useful. (Hint: don’t write about your company, write about how to solve your prospects’ problems.)

Blogging is the one of the most powerful B2B marketing tactics that a company can adopt. Each blog post is one more ticket in the search engine lottery for getting found by your prospective customers when they are researching a solution to their problem.

According to HubSpot, companies that blog get…

More traffic:

Companies that blog get 55% more website traffic than those that don’t blog.

More leads:

Companies that blog get 70% more leads than those that don’t blog.

More customers:

57% of companies have acquired a customer through their blog.

And, blogs affect purchasing decisions:

71% of companies said blogs affect their purchase decisions

In addition to blogging, your content marketing efforts should include some premium content that is mapped to the buyer’s journey.

Examples of premium content include eBooks, whitepapers, tip sheets, recorded webinars, etc. The content should answer questions related to the buyer’s journey to help educate them on the nature of the problem you solve and how to make a smart purchase in your category.

This content should be placed on your site behind a landing page with a form so that you can capture their email address, name and any other information that you need (but don’t ask for too much more information).

Congratulations, you now have a lead! But don’t toss the lead to sales just yet – most people who become a lead on your site are looking to buy, but not right now. That leads us to the next step.

3. Use Email Marketing. Social media gets a lot of attention these days, but email marketing is still the tactic with greater firepower. It is just about the best way to develop a relationship with your prospects as they get to know, like and trust your company.

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to communicate with your prospects because they will have agreed to receive emails from you and every one of them should receive the message (as opposed to social media posts, which a lot fewer will see).

4. Use Marketing Automation Software. Marketing automation software can help B2B companies close the gap between marketing and sales by seamlessly and consistently nurturing prospects with relevant information at every stage of the sales cycle.

In addition, this software helps to automate repetitive marketing tasks, create and maintain a database of potential and current customers, integrates with a customer relationship management (CRM) program and more.

5. Measure Your Marketing. That which can be measured can be improved! Sadly, many B2B marketers are still not using readily available data to make informed decisions. You might be good at gut decisions, but these days you can base your decisions more on data than instinct.

With Internet marketing, there are a number of key metrics to monitor to help you quickly determine which lead generation tactics are working and which are not. Armed with that information, you can do more of what’s working and less of what’s not working.

And most importantly, with marketing automation software, you can tie sales back to specific marketing activities to calculate your ROI.

Your turn: What do you think are the fastest ways to improve B2B marketing?

photo credit: PDA.PHOTO via photopin cc

Are Your Marketing Campaigns Leaking Leads?

Today’s buyers are know how to get access to the resources they need to research and make a purchase decision. This means marketers have to be extremely proactive in their marketing efforts, providing the resources and tools across each of the channels that buyers use to make their decisions.

BUT WHAT IF:

Your Website Content Doesn’t Engage or Convert Visitors?

Your Email is Never Opened?

Your Visitors Don’t Convert on Your Landing Pages?

The Solution? Marketers need to ensure content is relevant to the individual at each and every touch point.

3 Tips to Capture Missed Opportunities Across Channels 

1. Create an Always Relevant Buyer Journey For Known Contacts

While you capture leads and drive brand awareness through display, remarketing and lead nurture programs, ensure your website is ALWAYS RELEVANT and ready to convert visitors with the call to action that is most likely to drive them further along in their buyer’s journey. Web personalization tools like Get Smart Content have data integrations that connect your advertising, lead nurturing campaigns and your website, allowing marketers to serve the most relevant content to each visitor at every stage of the buying process.

When visitors come to your website to research your solutions, content personalization automatically aligns your visitor’s web content experience with the ad campaign they clicked or email they previously received or web content they previously engaged with, creating an always relevant content experience that guides and converts leads along their buyer’s journey. This positive brand experience means visitors are less likely to bounce and are more likely to complete your calls to action, helping you maximizing return on investment in your marketing campaigns and drive more qualified MQLs to your sales team more quickly and efficiently.

2. Personalize the Web Experiences of Anonymous Visitors and Existing Customers

Using behavioral insights, we can now eliminate the anonymous visitor. Before a visitor ever completes a web form, utilize their digital body language data to connect them with content relevant to their audience segment or persona. By personalizing content based on a visitor’s geolocation, previous engagement, keyword searched, ad clicked, referring site, etc., you can better engage formerly anonymous visitors with content and CTAs that drives them to convert.

This doesn’t just stop anonymous prospects. Existing customers also present the opportunity to drive revenue. Use your website to serve personalized content to upsell or cross-sell existing customers based on the product the previously purchased.

3. Capture More Opportunities to Engage High-Value Target Accounts

Your sales team likely has a list of high-value target accounts with qualities and challenges similar to your existing customers. Rather than limiting your account based marketing to advertising and email, create personalized experiences on your website that ensure your content is extremely relevant and personalized to each of these target accounts, catching more opportunities to engage these high-value prospects across channels.

Each time a visitor on your target account list comes to your website, their content experience is always customized to their account and stage of the purchase process, increasing rate of conversion for high-value prospects.

Stop leaking leads and make always relevant marketing your new reality.

If your interested in creating an optimized cross channel experience that catches missed opportunities to convert visitors into leads, increases conversion rates and accelerates your sales cycle, we’d love to show you how Get Smart Content can work for you.

Body Language, ”the gestures, movements, and mannerisms by which a person or animal communicates with others.” Body language is key to interpersonal relations, as it helps us understand how a person thinks or feels especially when verbal communication is unavailable. In addition to helping us better read people’s emotions, body language also helps us adjust our behavior accordingly without explicit direction from others.

We are born with the ability to read body language. It is intrinsic to how we communicate.

But body language isn’t only limited to interpersonal interactions. Body language is also available online in digital form. Every interaction a visitor has online, implies the visitor’s interests, needs and intent. There is a wealth of untapped, self-defined data available to marketers to improve their digital interactions with visitors, written about in detail by Steve Woods. The challenge?

Marketers Continue to Utilize One-Size-Fits All Web Content, Ignoring the Digital Body Language of Their Visitors.

Can you imagine if we acted like this in real-life? Picture this: You walk into your favorite shop to buy new shoes. You find a pair you like and ask the clerk to grab you a pair in your size to try on. The clerk comes back with a pair of jeans. Not only are they not what you asked for, they are also 2 sizes too big! As you start to object, the clerk responds that these jeans are his favorite product the store sells. You’d probably be a little annoyed right?

Stop Using The Same Brand-Centric Messaging, Start Focusing On the Visitors Needs.

Recently there has been a push to create more visitor-centric content, and marketers have responded, creating whitepapers, emails, datasheets and other content marketing material that addresses the visitors needs and challenges. But, for most websites, the story remains the same. Your homepage probably displays a slideshow telling the company value proposition and featuring a few core products. The content remains the same whether it’s the visitors first or fifth visit, where they’re located, whether they’ve already downloaded content and regardless of what pages they previously visited.

How to Identify and Use Digital Body Language to Personalize The Visitor Experience With Your Website

Visitors leave a trail of interaction data online that denote their interests and the challenges they are looking to solve.  Use this digital body language to personalize the content and call to action served to each visitor, enhancing their digital experience in an unobtrusive, yet valuable fashion. You help them find relevant information faster and don’t have to waste time asking them to complete the same online actions again and again.

Here are some examples of how to identify visitor’s needs using digital body language data:

• Neuro-Sell: How Neuroscience Can Power Your Sales Success
• Bare Knuckle Selling
• Bare Knuckle Negotiating
• Bare Knuckle Customer Service
• The Inner Winner

When people hear the term "Internet of Things" they picture techie gadgets like Nest thermometer. It's like a traditional thermometer on steroids: Connected to the internet, Nest learns your home heating habits over time, and adjusts the temperature to help you save energy and money. It also connects to a mobile app, so you can monitor your home's energy usage while you're away. 

But the Internet of Things (also abbreviated as IoT) isn't all about nifty home gadgets -- it'll fundamentally change the way we do marketing in the next 10 years. Gone will be the interruptive, outbound days of yore, and here to stay will be relevant, data-driven inbound marketing. Yup, thanks to IoT, banner ads will be inbound.

Why? Because the IoT is as much about the gadgets it connects as the data that comes out of those connections.

For example, Nest knows that you like it 65 degrees when you're lounging at home in February and 58 degrees when you're out of the house. If you allowed Nest to share that information with third parties -- such as a sweatshirt company -- those companies could send you much more tailored and engaging content. Heck, the sweatshirt company could send you a nice new sweatshirt with a note that says, "Thanks for doing your part to help the environment! In case you're ever feeling a little chilly, here's something to keep you warm."

Yep, it's a little creepy, I'll admit. But if you had control over what information was shared to which parties, an interaction like that would feel more personal and much more lovable. 

And that's just the surface of what the IoT can do. 

The Internet of Things Can Help Inbound

There are lots of things wrong with interruptive marketing. It's not tailored to your audience's interests. It usually interrupts whatever your audience is trying to do at a given moment. Oh, and there's very little measurable ROI. 

On the other hand, inbound attracts you like a magnet. It's marketing your audience is actually interested it. It's personalized to their interests and needs. And it's really easy for you to measure its impact. With the IoT, the flaws with outbound marketing can be eliminated. If you can mine the data from IoT devices, you can tailor your content to serve your customers' needs.

For example, let's say there's a fast food chain you absolutely love. You've signed up for their email reward program and downloaded their mobile app already. With the IoT, that chain could use that data on you to make sure you -- and only you -- see a billboard ad a mile before a rest stop where their chain is located, and know if you ended up purchasing food from that chain based on that billboard ad. So that billboard ad would be giving you relevant content (you signed up for the rewards program, after all), at the right place (on the highway before a rest stop), at the right time (a mile before the rest stop) -- sounds like inbound to me.

As long as you're using the right data to delight your audience with the right content at the right time, the IoT could transform your marketing in a very, very good way.

Still ... We've Got to Be Careful

While the IoT opens many doors for marketers, there are two huge pitfalls we'll all need to avoid: privacy invasion and data overload. 

In 2012, WhatCounts, an email marketing company based in Atlanta, with almost 1000 customers (usually $50m – $1b in revenue, like including Red Lion Hotels & ShoppersChoice.com), was in a common situation.

WhatCounts specializes in helping marketers (esp. in media / retail / e-commerce / travel & financial services) send personalized messages to increase engagement rates.

Read more on How Email Marketing Company WhatCounts Added an Extra 26% To Their New Sales Growth Rate In One Year (+ Their Favorite Sales App: SalesLoft)…

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