Rnordman

Get your free eBook: Big Data is the biggest game-changing opportunity for marketing and sales since the Internet went mainstream. This ebook explores the business opportunities, company examples, and organizational implications of Big Data and advanced analytics through articles, videos, interviews, and presentations. Table of Contents Introduction Putting big data and advanced analytics to work [...]

Top performing B2B sales organizations rarely employ just one lead generation tactic. According to recent research, B2B companies are using multiple lead generation tactics including, email marketing, search engine optimization, teleprospecting, inbound marketing, direct mail and trade shows. Why then are so many consultants and companies out there actively promoting inbound marketing as the dominant lead generation strategy of our time?

Inbound marketing is based on developing high quality content that attracts qualified buyers, who are in the early stages of the sales cycle. “Build it and they will come.” But can you build enough content and who will come? The same inbound marketing experts will tell you that it might take 50 blogs to impact your website visits. Despite their best intentions, many B2B companies are not able to generate the frequent high-quality content necessary to fuel an inbound marketing lead generation program.

Does your firm have the capacity and expertise to develop targeted content for different buyer personas at different stages of the sales funnel? Remember that high-quality persuasive content is not your corporate brochure or a sales pitch, thinly disguised as a white paper. According to the research study, “Connecting the Dots between Content and Sales”, by IDG Enterprise Research, content quality and integrity is very important to decision-makers. They discovered that 42% of IT Decision-Makers found it extremely or very challenging to find trusted information. Their main concern was how vendor bias would impact the information quality.

Lead Quality Drives Increased Revenue

B2B companies know that lead quality is just as important if not more important than the quantity of leads generated. There is an active debate about the quality difference between leads from inbound versus outbound marketing. Let’s take a closer look at the quality of leads produced by these lead generation tactics and how this impacts your ability to further develop these prospects into customers.

Most leads from inbound marketing provide basic demographic information on forms to download or access content. There is a direct relationship between requesting more detailed information and declining form conversions. The more information you request, the fewer leads that will download your content. So your “qualified inbound lead” may consist of a person’s first and last name, the company or organization, an email address and maybe the size of the company. And who knows if this information is accurate. A healthcare company recently received a white paper download from Dr. Kildare at the MASH Hospital Unit.

Also, if you have defined your target to be C-Level executives in your industry, are they likely to search the web for solutions themselves? Many executives will delegate this responsibility to lower level people within their organization. Your “qualified” inbound marketing lead may actually be an administrative assistant or lower level executive with only limited decision-making or influencing ability.

Compare this to a qualified lead from a professional telepropsecting company. The prospect has been personally engaged by a highly trained, experienced salesperson who has helped identify a pain point, possible solutions and qualified the prospect by numerous pre-determined information points. Of these two examples of qualified leads, which one will your company be able to more quickly and efficiently convert to a customer?

We define the attributes of a truly qualified lead as:

1. SIC or NAICS code
    
2. Firmographics (revenue, #employees, # of locations)
    
3. Decision makers and influencers identified
    
4. Environment documented
    
5. Decision-maker engaged
    
6. Business pain(s) uncovered/validated
    
7. Decision-making process and timeframe documented
    
8. Budget allocated or process for budgeting documented
    
9. Competitive landscape documented
    
10. Sense of urgency or compelling event exists

For more information on qualified leads please download our White Paper—How to Build a Funnel Full of Solid Gold Leads.

A developed quality lead sets the stage for relationship selling, lead nurturing and prospect development. The more successful your prospect development program—the more successful you will be at driving revenue. One firm that benefited from an effective outbound prospect development program was Joulex. An Atlanta-based software company, Joulex, increased new business sales opportunities in their pipeline by more than $2 million dollars from qualified leads generated by an outbound prospecting program.

Another benefit of outbound marketing prospect development is reaching prospects earlier in the sales cycle. Some companies may not even be aware of their pain proposition or whether a solution exists or not. Inbound marketing only identifies prospects that are actively searching for a solution. Your outbound prospect development program may identify prospects before they even start their buying research. Why not be the first company to offer a solution and get a huge jump on your competition?

Why wait for qualified leads to come to you? Adding outbound prospect development to your lead generation mix allows you to aggressively and actively beat your lead generation and sales forecasts. For more information on driving more revenue with prospect development programs please click here.

By Dan McDade

Amanda Maksymiw is a rising star in the content marketing world. Correction, she has already risen – she is a star. Not just a thought leader, but a practitioner. The kind of person who doesn’t just talk about it, she does it. She got internet-fabulous with her work at OpenView Venture Partners and is now helping put Lattice Engines on the map. I hope you enjoy her Madlibs…here we go:

1. The b2b buyer is someone who wants to feel like (s)he is leading the pack.
2. The biggest innovation in marketing is content!
3. The coolest thing happening in b2b marketing is the shift to educating the buyer rather than shouting at them.
4. My favorite marketing book is Content Rules by Ann Handley and CC Chapman.
5. My favorite social media channel is Instagram (personal) and Twitter (professional).
6. Social media for b2b is essential. It’s a great way to show personality and engage with your audience.
7. b2b video is often not used enough.
8. In b2b, the idea of a funnel is not synonymous with the buyer’s journey.
9. The first thing every marketer should do is get into the heads of their buyers.
10. Content marketing is the foundation of all marketing efforts.
11. The biggest mistake marketers make is making assumptions.
12. The biggest myth in b2b marketing is that you can’t get inspiration from b2c.
13. My favorite marketing technology besides marketing automation is CMS.
14. Besides revenue, the metric every marketer must track is number of Twitter followers! (I kid!) After revenue, conversions should be tracked.
15. My most forgettable marketing experience is creating content with corporate-speak.
16. Mobile marketing is important but b2b hasn’t yet latched on.
17. The next “hot-thing” in marketing will be predictive analytics so that marketers can predict their next customer, rather than guessing.
18. In 2015, marketing will include even more analytics and metrics.
19. Madlibs with the Funnelholic is a fun thing to do on Monday afternoons.

Amanda Maksymiw is the content marketing manager for Lattice Engines, a company that delivers business applications to help marketing and sales predict and close their next customer. She is responsible for setting and managing the Lattice’s content marketing and social media strategies including creating, producing, and publishing engaging content. Throughout her career, she has advised and worked with several technology startups on their content strategies. Follow Amanda on Twitter at @amandamaks

How do you keep up to speed on what’s happening in business? Do you scan the Twitters, read your RSS feeds, or watch the news? For me it’s a combination of all of those things, though I will admit watching the news has become a rarity as I find current news in so many other forms. Following current news is great, but I find myself wanting something more. I want those inspiring ideas from thought leaders, jaw dropping debates on real business problems, and open discussions on what is changing in business. Sure, I can read the latest blog posts on those topics and I do, but I still want some entertainment value that a blog post struggles to deliver. I’m finding myself turning to podcasts to fill the void and I don’t think I’m alone.

I love podcasts because I can take them anywhere. I download them to my phone and listen when I’m traveling, while I’m working, and even while I’m working out. The convenience factor can’t be beat. I was curious to find out what business podcasts top the lists as favorites for Social Media Explorer authors, so I asked. We’ve compiled a list of some of our personal favorites below and given you a little insight into why we love them so much.

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Entrepreneur on Fire

Hosted by: John Lee Dumas

Recommended by: Nichole Kelly

John Lee Dumas knows what fire is all about. He interviews some of the most notorious and on the rise entrepreneurs in business, every day. That’s right, he publishes an episode every single day of the week. His podcast focuses on hearing the story behind the entrepreneur, how they generated success and what tips they have for other entrepreneurs. As an entrepreneur myself, Entrepreneur on Fire is my go to podcast and the one that I look forward the most. While I don’t listen every day, it is the first on my listen to download while I’m on the go.

Listen In: http://www.entrepreneuronfire.com/

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Six Pixels of Separation

Hosted by: Mitch Joel

Recommended by: Nichole Kelly

Mitch Joel has long been respected in digital marketing as a true visionary in the space. His podcast focuses on bringing some of the greatest minds to the table to discuss important topics in digital marketing, inspiring debates and everything you need to know to stay abreast on what’s happening and more importantly what’s coming next.

Listen In: http://www.twistimage.com/podcast/

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Marketing Over Coffee

Hosted by: Chris Penn and John Wall

Recommended by: Nichole Kelly

All of my great ideas come over coffee and I guess I’m not alone! Marketing Over Coffee is hosted by Chris Penn and John Wall where they share what’s new in marketing in bit-sized chunks that are designed to be consumed with a good cup of Joe and a nice slice of coffee cake. They talk about everything from new technology to informational interviews with industry leaders.

Listen In: http://www.marketingovercoffee.com/

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Marketing Smarts

Hosted by: Kerry O’Shea Gorgone of MarketingProfs

Recommended by: Nichole Kelly

Marketing Smarts is exactly what you’d expect. Guests talk about marketing strategy, social media, personal branding, and more. Each episode features a 30-minute interview with a different marketing expert. Some guests are CMOs, some are CEOs, others are authors or well known bloggers. All offer a valuable perspective on how to succeed in the industry.

Listen In: http://marketingprofs.com/podcasts

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The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show

Hosted by: Travis Jenkins

Recommended by: Nichole Kelly

I found this podcast after I participated in an interview. Since then, I’ve grown to love the great entrepreneurial stories and business tips the guests provide. Travis does a great job of exposing each entrepreneur’s inner rock star in a way that others can learn from. The combination of personal stories and insights into their business acumen is more than entertaining, it’s useful for growing a business. Full disclosure – Travis and I hit it off so much that two of his companies have since become clients of Social Media Explorer | SME Digital.

Listen In: http://theentrepreneursradioshow.com/#

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HBR IdeaCast

Hosted by: Sarah Green, Harvard Business Review

Recommended by: Nichole Kelly

Personally, I love to keep up with what the Harvard Business Review finds interesting in business. I used their case studies during my MBA program at Loyola College of Maryland and fell in love with the way they present ideas for debate. I feel smarter every time I listen and it helps to open new areas of business and management that are worth thinking about.

Listen In: http://blogs.hbr.org/ideacast/

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Social Triggers Insider

Hosted by: Derek Halpern

Recommended by: Nichole Kelly

What I love about Derek Halpern’s podcast is that he only publishes an episode when he has something really profound to say. There are some that may argue that frequency is key, but Derek makes sure that quality information is at the center. He publishes 3-4 episodes a year and makes sure they are worth it. The content focuses on everything from generating more leads to making big decisions.

Listen In: http://socialtriggers.com/category/social-triggers-insider/

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eBook Ninjas

Hosted by: Joshua Tallent, Toby Stevenson, Chris Casey

Recommended by: Marc A. Pitman

eBook Ninjas talks about everything e-publishing. If you are an author, want to be an author or just want to know what’s happening in the publishing world this is the podcast for you. They cover new ereaders, formats, sales ideas, conferences. It’s a great one stop shop for getting up to speed on the latest in ebooks.

Listen In: http://ebookninjas.com/

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Inside PR

Hosted by: Gini Detrich, Joseph Thornley and Martin Waxman

Recommended by: Marc A. Pitman

The brainchild of  Terry Fallis & David Jones, Inside PR does exactly what you’d expect. Each episode dives deep into what is happening in PR, what trends are important, and the big questions PR professionals are facing.

Listen In: http://www.insidepr.ca/

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350 Third

Hosted by: Anders Brownworth, Scott Barstow

Recommended by: Marc A. Pitman

350 Third covers “the impact of the Internet on business.” I have been a fan of Anders Brownworth for years. He’s an extremely early, early adopter. And he’s got an ability to describe really techie things in normal English. This podcast is incredibly informative and at one 20-30 minute episode every other week, it’s easy to stay current with.

Listen In: http://350Third.com/

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Eventual Millionaire

Hosted by: Jaime Tardy

Recommended by: Marc A. Pitman

Each week, Jaime interviews millionaires like Tim Ferris, Yanik Silver, and Briana Borten. I love the way she gets them to talk about their diverse experiences. And that she always ends with asking them for “one action” listeners can take this week. Very actionable and inspiring.

Listen In: http://www.eventualmillionaire.com/blog/millionaire-case-studies/

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Your Grand Idea

Hosted by: Todd Skaggs and Kevin Carter

Recommended by: Lewis Bertolucci, Social Media Director, Humana

This podcast is great for businesses of any size, but especially for small businesses who aren’t marketing geniuses. Each week the hosts discuss a single idea “that must meet the 3 P’s: Possible for ANY business to use, Proven – no concepts, must be an actual promotion with results, Profitable – must have delivered at least $1000 to the bottom line.” Great ideas and tips for businesses that have actually worked for others.

Listen In: http://www.yourgrandidea.com/podcasts/

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The SoLoMo Show

Hosted by: Cory O’Brien & Adam Helweh

Recommended by: Adam Helweh

The SoLoMo show discusses topics, trends, tactics and tools related to social, local, and mobile marketing and advertising. Why do you love it? Well …. besides the fact that I am a co-host, I believe we cover things from a little bit different angle. The show is always a blend of technology, marketing and advertising. We break down the things that matter for those that don;t have the time to stay current on how the latest change to a social network might help them or trends in mobile advertising that they need to look out for. We’ve got their back.

Listen In: www.solomoshow.com

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The Friday Hangout

Hosted by: Janet Fouts, Adam Helweh, Steve Farnsworth

Recommended by: Adam Helweh

The Friday Hangout focuses on digital marketing, social media marketing, PR, branding. I think we have one of the funniest podcasts out there on digital and social marketing. We have awesome expert guests (guest list) join us each week. The dynamic of having 3 hosts and a guest every episode makes for an engaging show. Lastly, we inject a ton of humor and fun into the show so the show is very upbeat and entertaining in addition to being informative.

Listen In: www.thefridayhangout.com

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The Friday Five

Hosted by: Tom Webster

Recommended by: Kerry O’Shea Gorgone

When your mind needs a bit of a rest and pure fun try The Friday Five which is focused on “Music DNA” where guests share life experiences relating to each of five different songs. It’s like hearing how they chose the soundtrack for their personal story. The Friday Fun is pure fun for me. Listening to each episode is like sitting down for a beer a new friend and getting their life story. Many of the guests are well known social media professionals, and the listeners probably connect with them online, which makes it even more fun to hear guests share personal anecdotes relating to each of five songs.

Listen In: http://thefridayfive.com

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The Work Talk Show

Hosted by: DJ Waldow and Nick Westergaard

Recommended by: Kerry O’Shea Gorgone

The Work Talk Show is about work, productivity, office dynamics, location-independent work, career strategy, work/life balance, and more. The hosts bring their own humor and perspective to each episode, and they invite smart, interesting guests who broke out of the cubicle to build their ideal career. There are as many different paths to professional success as there are people, so each episode is different.

Listen In: http://worktalkshow.com

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This is far from an all-inclusive list. What’s your favorite business podcast? Share a comment with the podcast and tell us why. Let’s create the biggest list of awesome business podcasts on the web together! While you’re free to tell us about your own podcast, the best recommendations come from your listeners. So listeners, give your favorites some love and tell us about them. 

   

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There are many complex decisions to be made when planning your company's expansion into new countries. No culture is alike, and each country has a language and customs unique to itself. Ergo, you would think that culture and language research would be top of the agenda for every company planning to penetrate new markets.

Over the years, however, we have seen and heard some stories emerge on various websites and blogs about some brands' lack of research in the areas of culture and language. But we could never be 100% sure if they were legit or not -- some seemed too awful or hilarious to be true. So in this blog post, we thought it'd be fun to revisit those alleged blunders, and try to get to the bottom of the legends. Let's play a little game of True or False, shall we?

1) Coors

The Story: This rocky mountain ice cold beer company decided to cool down their Spanish market. However, the translator for Coors must have been product testing that day and their slogan "Turn It Loose," when translated, became "Suffer From Diarrhea." Not really something I would elect to do on a Friday evening after work. True or False? 

FALSE.

There are reports that Coors used the phrase suéltalo con Coors which translates, literally, to "let it go loose with Coors"; there are other reports that they used the phrase suéltate con Coors, which literally translates to "set yourself free with Coors." However, according to David Wilton, author of Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends, Coors never actually ran an ad campaign featuring any of these slogans.

2) Dairy Association

The Story: When expanding into Mexico, the Dairy Association's hugely successful "Got Milk" campaign was not so well received. Translated, the slogan became "Are You Lactating?" I have a feeling that slogan didn't resonate with as wide of an audience as the Dairy Association was hoping. True or False?

FALSE.

According to Jeff Manning, executive director of the California Milk Processor Board, this was discovered and resolved in the market research phase. Phew.

3) Electrolux

The Story: Getting a country's official language correct is one thing, but don’t forget to research the colloquialisms of the culture, as well. Take this Scandinavian vacuum company as an example. They thought their slogan, "Nothing Sucks Like an Electrolux," was very clever given the powerful suction of their Electrolux vacuum cleaner. However, when they launched in America, it wasn’t quite clear whether Electrolux was being promoted -- or in fact dissed -- by a competitor. True or False?

TRUE.

According to Wikipedia, in the 1960s Electrolux successfully marketed vacuums in the United Kingdom with this slogan. It was later used in the United States, but the informal U.S. meaning of the word was actually already known in the UK. So, this was a bit of a marketing gamble, in hopes the edgy slogan would help them gain some attention in their international expansion. 

4) Pepsi

The Story: Here's a good Halloween marketing campaign from Pepsi -- only it wasn't a Halloween campaign, and was very offensive to the Chinese market they were trying to crack. Instead of promoting their famous slogan "Come alive with Pepsi generation," they marketed themselves by accidently saying "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead." Pepsi packs a powerful punch, but probably not that powerful. True or False?

UNCONFIRMED.

Pepsi has neither confirmed nor denied this claim. Let's move on to their competitor, then ...

5) Coca-Cola

The Story: One of the most famous blunders comes from the most widely known brand name in the world. When Coca-Cola was entering the Chinese market, the drink was pronounced "Ke-kou-ke-la" which, depending on dialect, meant "bite the wax tadpole" or "female horse stuffed with wax." True or False?

FALSE.

According to myth-debunking-site Snopes.com, store owners making their own signs made the blunder because they used their own dialect and characters, which in other regions translated to bite the wax tadpole, etc. Coke actually researched 40,000 Chinese characters and found a close phonetic equivalent, "ko-kou-ko-le," which can be loosely translated as "happiness in the mouth." 

6) Clairol

The Story: The German market was in for quite a shock when hair care company Clairol arrived on the scene with their "Mist Stick" curling iron. Why? "Mist" in German translates as "Manure." Yikes. I know they say mud is good for the skin but I'm not sure anyone could sell manure for the hair. True or False?

FALSE.

It looks like this story has been mixed up with that of a Rolls Royce Silver Mist story. Clairol, you're off the hook!

7) Parker Pens

The Story: Parker Pens had a fun time explaining themselves after bringing their product to Spain ... and promptly ensuring people it wouldn't get them pregnant. Their slogan (which leaves a lot to be desired in the first place) went from "It won't leak in your pocket and embarrass you" to "It won't leak in your pocket and make you pregnant." I should certainly hope not. True or False?

TRUE.

Or at least according to the examples in the book Brand Failures.

8) Powergen Italia

The Story: Even something as simple as a website address can go horribly wrong. Take Powergen Italia, for example. They're an Italian company who was expanding into English-speaking countries, and decided to go with the most obvious website address -- without thinking about how it would read for their English-speaking customers. Visit www.powergenitalia.com to learn more. Just kidding. They nixed that URL pretty promptly. True or False?

TRUE.

This is true according to several sources, including Ananova, although it's important to understand that this blunder didn't come from the Italian division of energy giant Powergen, but the marketing folks at Powergen Italia, an Italian maker of battery chargers. The website now switches you over to the more aptly named for English-speakers, www.batterychargerpowergen.it.

9) Gerber

The Story: Everybody knows the cute little Gerber baby that features on the front of all of their baby food products -- so sweet! However, when they entered the African market they failed to research product packaging norms. Had they done that, they would have discovered that products mostly feature images of the contents inside the packaging. Therefore, a jar with a cute little baby on the front didn't do so well. True or False?

FALSE.

According to Snopes.com, this is an urban legend -- which was both surprising and frightening to some HubSpotters that had heard this story when they were taking university-level PR classes. Yikes.

How some of these blunders got past the execs at these companies is unclear, but clearly it is possible to make catastrophic mistakes, even if you're a global leader like many of these brands. Allow yourself some time to properly roll out your global expansion plans, pulling in cultural and language experts along the way.

For more tips on setting yourself up for success, download the Marketer's Guide to European Expansion. Although we can't help with translation, we do cover essential topics like how to decide which markets will be a good fit, how to achieve a multilingual website, and SEO tips from expert Aleyda Solis.

Social selling really isn’t all that new, the most successful salespeople have been using social selling techniques and utilizing social media to connect with their Buyers for years.

It's not always about Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley. Here are 20 of the most capital-dense start-up communities in the country, according to new research.

These days, it seems like start-up hubs are everywhere.

Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley capture a lot of attention, but cities including Detroit, Michigan; Las Vegas, Nevada and Omaha, Nebraska each boast booming entrepreneurial communities of their own. Heck, even Canada is in the running for next start-up frontier.

However, some off-the-Silicon-path communities are better for entrepreneurs than others, according to Brad Feld, Managing Director of the Foundry Group and author of Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City.

Feld wrote about the importance of "entrepreneurial density"--or the ratio of start-up founders and those they employ to the general population of a city--in his book, and emphasized the belief that access to easy capital is what makes or breaks a start-up community on his blog.

Richard Florida, a senior editor at The Atlantic, latched onto Feld's idea of mapping capital-rich start-up centers in a series of articles published this month. Here are 20 of the most capital-dense start-up communities in the country, according to his research.

This entrepreneur reveals three founders who started off as failures--but then found their way to success.

I teach strategy and entrepreneurship at Babson College. Its undergraduate entrepreneurship program has topped the U.S. News & World Report survey every year in the last 20. Babson asked me to create a new course: Foundations of Entrepreneurial Management.

And if a student asked me the most important thing the she had to know by the end of the semester, I’d tell her that to achieve start-up success; you must fail over and over again until you learn what you need to succeed.

Failure: The Cold, Hard Truth

Before getting into the details of why this is so important, consider these statistics. Based more on the collective wisdom of venture capitalists I’ve interviewed, your odds of achieving start-up success on a large scale -- meaning starting a company that is worth at least $1 billion -- are about one in 10,000.

The logic behind this is that I have spoken with many VCs who talk with about 1,000 entrepreneurs for every one or two that they fund. This means that the other 999 or so, either get funded by another VC, find some other way to get capital, or shutter themselves. And out of every 10 companies in a VC’s portfolio, the general thinking is that one of 10 ends up being extremely successful, two or three more do reasonably well, and the rest close down.

Since April 2011 when I started researching my book, Hungry Start-up Strategy, I have interviewed at least 200 start-up CEOs. And one of my favorite recurring themes from those interviews is how so many successful start-ups failed over and over again before figuring out how they could succeed.

Three such stories come to mind-- pay service PayPal, team productivity enhancement app-maker Collaborate.com, and recruiting software as a service company Bullhorn.

Case Study: PayPal

The first is PayPal. Surely you have heard of this e-payment service that eBay acquired for $1.5 billion in 2002. What is interesting to me about PayPal is that one of its co-founders, Max Levchin who is now chairman of Yelp, told me that he originally started Confinity -- one of PayPal’s predecessor companies, to provide operating and systems software for the Palm Pilot, a handheld device that was very popular in the 1990s as a place for people to store all their contact information.

One of Confinity’s features was the ability to make payments online. Levchin kept receiving emails from eBay users who asked him to develop that feature to make it easier to pay for items purchase on eBay more securely. But Levchin ignored those emails from users for six months because he wanted Confinity to be a Palm Pilot operating system company.

But ultimately he abandoned his idea and focused solely on the eBay payments technology. In 2000, he merged Confinity with another payments company, X.com, co-founded by Tesla CEO, Elon Musk and eBay bought PayPal two years later.

Case Study: Collaborate.com

On July 9, 2013, I heard the story of Collaborate.com from Matt Cutler, who started Kibits in January 2011. “We had a general idea that we wanted to create private groupware that would be a Swiss army knife of functions -- Dropbox, social networks, and work-related activities. We were ahead of the market on social but we found pockets of intense use.”

Those pockets were in the area of business collaboration. According to Cutler, “Business teams told us that it was great for collaboration. They said, ’It is organized the right way. Please add these features.’”

Now Collaborate.com is booming. As Cutler explained, “We are enjoying triple to quadruple digit growth. Active users, registrations, average purchase price -- all our operating statistics are up and to the right.”

Case Study: Bullhorn

On July 15, I spoke with Art Papas, CEO of Bullhorn, which provides software as a service to employee recruitment firms. Papas started Bullhorn in 1999 but it was not until 2008 that he really figured out what Bullhorn was good at.

He failed in his attempt to make it a platform for connecting freelance workers with employers and at turning Bullhorn into a provider of software to help procure creative services.

But Bullhorn stumbled onto a problem that led to a very successful outcome. Papas met “Mike O’Donnell in Woodbridge, New Jersey who was willing to pay us to build a database for his recruiting firm to keep track of his operations over the Internet. Based on that, we were able to raise $750,000 from our original investors.”

By solving that problem, Bullhorn put itself onto a path to a profitable sale of the company to a private equity firm that leaves Papas still in charge. “We now have 6,000 customers in 34 countries and after raising $26 million in 2008 we reached $40 million in revenues by 2012 and sold our stock to a private equity firm for over $100 million.”

Even after selling out, Bullhorn remains private and Papas is CEO. “I can now get access to the money I need to make acquisitions and add new products. By 2017 we should reach $150 million in revenues and be in a position to go public or be acquired," explained Papas.

These three stories bring to mind the famous saying of GE founder, Thomas Edison, “genius in 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration.” For aspiring entrepreneurs this means that if you have an idea for a business, build the product, give it to customers, and see what happens.

If the customers don’t like your idea, try something new. If they like part of the idea, develop that. And if it fails, keep trying until you succeed.

Marketing has been democratised.

The capability to use marketing tools and technology without having to beg or pay for attention is unprecedented. It’s a time where you can now build your own crowd to market and sell to without paying the mass media gate keepers.

That’s social media.

The social media networks are at your disposal and with the right tactics and software you can create brand awareness and access to influencers and decision makers in boardrooms across the world.

This freedom to take control of your own marketing comes at a cost. The cost is complexity and time. To be effective it requires using multiple networks, constant content creation and monitoring and managing.

It’s not just multiple networks and multimedia to think of, it is also about adapting to new hardware platforms where consumers receive their messaging. This is no longer restricted to just print, TV and radio but has proliferated to laptops, smart phones and tablets. They all have their own limitations and parameters to be optimal.

Within this technology and media explosion there are many marketing trends that have been emerging that we should be paying attention to.

7 Marketing Trends

Here are seven trends that all marketers need to consider in their toolbox of tactics to remain effective and current.

1. Content marketing

The importance and role of content marketing and how it works across social media, search, multimedia and mobile is becoming a key focus for many brands. Many companies don’t understand the importance of this trend and how it underlies almost all digital marketing. Brands such as Coca Cola have recognised this and changed their strategies to meet the web realities.

Brands have been blinded by the shiny new toy of social media eg Facebook and think that Facebook marketing is all they should be doing beyond their day to day habitual marketing that they have been doing for decades.

This is just a snippet of your activity focus. You should not be forgetting Twitter, Blogs and Google+…just to mention a few to market your content.

Content is the foundation of all digital marketing and is the reason people read, view or share.

Creating “liquid content” is vital to create brand awareness and tap into crowd sourced marketing.

2. Mobile Marketing

The rapid rise of smart phones and tablets has flatfooted many marketing managers and delivering marketing messages and content that is optimized for mobile platforms is becoming a “must”. Increasingly consumers are viewing content, receiving emails and buying products from “small screens”.

Companies need to urgently redesign websites and blogs that are “responsive” (respond to all devices screen sizes for optimal viewing and usability) to ensure they are optimising for mobile devices. Some websites are recording 30-40% of all traffic from mobile devices. That should not be ignored. It will cost you money and lead to missed opportunities.

3. Integrated Digital Marketing

Companies that are savvy marketers are realizing that digital marketing should not be one offs that are islands of isolated tactics. Social media and content is impacting search results. Google created Google+ for a few reasons including capturing social signals. Ensuring that your approach is allowing you to tie them all together to achieve maximum effectiveness is becoming key.

This is optimised and integrated digital marketing.

4. Social Media at Scale Marketing

Brands are also realizing that “doing” social is complex and is like juggling many balls at once. We are seeing the rush to develop, buy up start-ups and implement Enterprise platforms that are assisting marketing professionals to market, manage and monitor multiple social networks and even other digital marketing (eg email).

The tools to manage the complexity are emerging and evolving as the rush to package the technology accelerates. The holy grail to have one tool to manage your marketing is the mission for many software companies who see this opportunity.

This is “social at scale”

5. Continuous Marketing

Marketers need to realise that a strong trend is emerging called continuous marketing. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t run “campaigns”. The reality is that being found online (found in social network updates, Twitter streams and in a Google search) requires constant SEO activity and content creation, publishing and marketing.

Google hates silence.

Creating, curating and marketing content that is fed into the maws of the social media beast needs to be relentless or you will left behind and you will be lost in the web noise.

To do this well requires implementing marketing automation that leverages your time and resources.

6. Personalized Marketing

The “one size fits all” approach to marketing where mass messages on television and traditional media are becoming less effective due to media saturation. We are seeing the rise of personalized marketing on e-commerce sites, websites and emails that tailor the advertising and user interface to the relevant interests of consumers.

Visit an online store once and come back and the website knows that you are male and like Nike runners. The next email that arrives has also been personalised with products that you visited while shopping online. The web is capturing your habits as it reads the data, applies intelligence and serves up information that is relevant to “you”.

This trend is being driven by technology using “big data” to increase marketing effectiveness.

7. Visual Marketing

We first saw the creep of visual marketing into the landscape when YouTube entered mainstream consciousness a few years ago. Since then this creep has turned into a torrent of visual marketing with emergence of Pinterest, Instagram and even Slideshare.

In the last 6 months this has gone to a whole new level as Vine’s 6 second snack size video and now Instagram’s new 15 second video app has marketers scrambling for creative inspiration to apply and leverage this new trend.

Your marketing needs to ride this trend to increase engagement and cut through the online noise.

What about you?

Which trends excite you or even surprise you? Have you adapted your tactics to meet the continual marketing and technology eveolution.

Look forward to hearing your stories, feedback and insights in the comments below.

Image by Shutterstock

How are you tracking the return on your content? It’s a simple question, but for many marketers, it’s one that likely comes with a complex answer.

Why? Let’s look at the context. This year, content marketing has become the #1 priority for marketers. Yet most of the emphasis so far has been on simply producing the content in the hopes that if we build it they’ll come. But now content investments are coming due and the CMO’s organization is being asked to demonstrate a return on the more than $16B being spent on content marketing.

While some companies are tracking leads generated directly from white papers or webinars, and others can track viewthroughs and shares of online video clips, I’d estimate that there are many who haven’t taken the next important step of measuring the return on their content investments.

It doesn’t have to be this way though, and if the content marketing ecosystem – which includes everyone from brand marketers and content producers, to agencies and software platforms – is going to continue to thrive, then marketers need simple ways to measure their return on content.

A Four-Step Return on Content Framework

While there’s no one correct way to measure your content efforts, I’d like to share a simple framework that should give you a reasonable starting point. There are four steps:

1. Calculate your fixed content creation and development costs
How much does it cost to create the content? These include elements like video production, copywriting and design, and the labor behind them.

2. Calculate your ongoing promotional costs
How much are you spending to get the content seen? This includes factors like paid promotion on social networks and ad platforms, and your average click-through rate or CPM. 

3. Identify your payback factors
Since you’ve paid to have content developed and you’re paying to get it seen, now you need to determine the actual payback. Metrics that factor into payback can include online conversion rates and the number of leads generated, as well as sales stats like average order value (AOV) or average selling price (ASP).

4. Calculate your return
Identifying how much the content initiative cost and what you gained in exchange is the hard part. Now, calculating the return on your content is as simple as dividing the net payback by total cost within a consistent time frame.

The Framework in Action

Take a financial services brand that launched a content marketing campaign across three personal finance blogs, for example. The campaign includes a series of three videos, a retirement guide, and an infographic on personal wealth. The initiative is supported by a display campaign to drive traffic to a branded content site designed to further inform and capture leads. The company spends a total of $40,000 to create and promote the content over six months (Step 1: Fixed content creation cost and Step 2: Ongoing promotional costs).

Through promotion, SEO and social sharing, the company is able to generate 1,400 targeted site visitors per month (Step 3: Payback factor). That traffic converts to newsletter signups or free consultation requests at a rate of three percent (Step 3: Payback factor). Those leads convert into actual customers at a rate of 10 percent (Step 3: Payback factor). At an average 6-month value per customer of $3,000, the total payback revenue is $75,600 (Step 3: Payback factor).

Using the framework, this financial services company achieves a return of 89% on their content program in that six month period (Step 4: Calculate the return). And while there are likely a myriad other benefits like increased brand awareness and growth in thought leadership, utilizing this formula offers some solid data to put in front of a skeptical CFO.

It’s a little fuzzy without real numbers from your own business, so I encourage you to download our free Content Return Calculator, which is an easy to use spreadsheet that lets you plug in your assumptions and start quantifying the value of your content marketing efforts.

What If Content Return is Negative?

There is no one-size-fits-all set of metrics for content costs and paybacks across market segments, so questions will arise about different variables and industries.

There’s also the question of what determines whether a company is getting a “good” or “bad” return on content marketing. Will it be higher or lower based on the target audience? Is it OK to have a negative return?

Meanwhile, measuring the return on your content in the way I’ve described above doesn’t measure softer brand benefits such as positioning or credibility. Those are all important factors in assessing the value of content marketing, but we didn’t include them because there’s a separate, more difficult art to quantifying brand value in most cases.

Content marketing is undoubtedly hot. It feels good to offer something to consumers that’s more valuable than just advertising messages, and there are many of us who intuitively recognize content marketing as an effective part of the marketing mix. But removing the black box and clearing up some of the fuzziness will get everyone from the CMO, to the CFO and the CEO on board with content marketing’s role and business value.

Email marketing may not be the trendiest marketing tactic right now but it still works. Email is where you warm your leads up for a potential sale. If you’re using social media for lead generation, completing the nurturing process through email can be very effective. If you want to generate leads, convert leads, and develop a relationship with your customers, you must use email marketing effectively.

Want to be successful with your email marketing campaign?

Follow these 9 rules for successful email marketing campaigns:

Clean your database

• Get rid of the emails that bounce
• Make sure to remove people who opt out

Write better subject lines

• An email campaign can die at the headline, so it better be good
• 64% of people say they open an email because of the subject line. (Source: Chadwick Martin Bailey)
• People are busy and incessantly inundated- break through the clutter or be ignored
• Give them a reason to open it – pique interest and say what you’re going to deliver
• Be concise: Subject lines with 30 or fewer characters performed above average in opens, clicks, and click-to-opens (Source: Adestra July 2012 Report)
• For B2B companies, subject lines that contained terms such as “money,” “revenue,” and “profit” perform the highest (Source: Adestra July 2012 Report)
• Subject lines that contained terms such as “ROI,” “asset,” and “industry” perform the lowest. (Source: Adestra July 2012 Report)
• News-related terms in subject lines perform fair but better than discount-related terms. “News” (16.2%), “update” (4.9%), “breaking” (33.5%), “alert” (25.9%), and “bulletin” (12.5%) all saw better than average click-to-open rates (as well as clicks and opens), with “newsletter” being the only term to perform below average in each metric. “Alert” saw the best differential for clicks (78.3%), while “news” did best for opens (30.9%). (Source: Adestra July 2012 Report)

Break up content into manageable pieces

People are more likely to consume information that is an easy to digest format.

• Use bullets
• Be as clear and concise as possible

Write for your audience

• Know your audience and how they like to consume information
• Know the language of your audience
• Know how much information they are willing to consume in email

Test for best time and frequency

You’re going through all of this effort to reach your audience, you can’t afford to waste time or money, so make sure you’re sending emails at optimal times to increase email open rates and click throughs. If you know your audience is particularly busy during certain times, don’t send it then.

• Use testing or simply study when you get the best open rates and click throughs
• Every audience is different so you may have to do some trial and error
• You can also test a specific subset of your audience

Optimize for mobile

More and more people access email through mobile devices. If your email doesn’t format well for mobile and tablets, you will lose out on a lot of opportunity and risk having people unsubscribe.

• Knotice says 41 percent of commercial emails were opened on mobile devices in the second half of 2012 — up from 27 percent a year earlier and just 13 percent at the end of 2010

Write like a journalist: use the inverted pyramid

Use the journalistic method of writing using the inverted pyramid; put the most important content first. Chances are people won’t read the entire email and they’re likely to skim, so make sure that if you have something you really want your audience to hear you put it at the top.

Commit to consistency

People are more likely to read your emails if you are consistent because they know when to look out for them and when to expect them. It may be difficult and require discipline, but consistency is huge. Your audience needs to be able to depend on you and consistency is required in order to establish a relationship.

• Be consistent with your language
• Be consistent with your layout
• Be consistent with delivery days and times
• Be consistent with frequency

Always deliver value

Don’t ever send emails that aren’t worth your audience’s time. They’re busy and are likely to unsubscribe if you send content that’s not high quality, relevant, and useful.

• People already get too many emails, they don’t have time to sift through junk
• People aren’t very forgiving
• Not sending quality content tells your audience that you haven’t taken the time to get to know them
• 61% of people state that “not being interested in an email” was the most common reason for not opening an email, followed by “getting too many emails” (45%). (Source:Chadwick Martin Bailey, 2012)
• 25% of people complain they dislike all the marketing clutter they get, yet 40% claimed to enjoy getting lots of marketing emails from favorite brands and deal services each week.(Source: 2012 Blue Kangaroo Survey on Marketing Emails)

If you’re interested in starting an email marketing campaign but don’t know where to start, give a shout out to our Digital Director, Richard Morrow. He would be happy to provide you with a free consultation and can work with you at whatever stage of email marketing you’re at.

What are the email marketing rules that you think are most important to stick to?

Paid search now accounts for around a quarter (24%) of the average business' total marketing budget, according to a new report from Econsultancy and NetBooster.

The UK Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report 2013 asked respondents about the division of marketing budgets into the search, social media and display categories. 

Paid search is apportioned the largest average budget by companies (24%), followed by SEO (18%). Social media and display had equal average share of budget (both 11%).

This figure could potentially increase further by 2014, as more than half of respondents (55%) said they expect their PPC budgets to increase over the next 12 months.

In comparison SEO and social spending were both predicted to increase by 51% of respondents, while 42% said they expect to spend more on display advertising.

Do you expect your budgets to increase or decrease in the next 12 months?

The report, covering search engine optimisation (SEO or natural search), paid search (PPC) and social media marketing, is based on an online survey of more than 500 client-side digital marketers and agencies.

Paid search budget

The report also asks respondents how much they spend on paid search each year.

The results are quite varied – a quarter of respondents (25%) spend less than £10,000 a year on paid search, a figure which has decreased from 30% in 2012. The remaining 75% of respondents spend between £10,000 and £5 million on PPC.

How much do you spend on paid search per year?

As one might expect, Google is the main beneficiary of paid search spending, with two-thirds (65%) of companies having increased their PPC budget with Google this year. This is up from 59% in 2012.

The proportion of businesses increasing their spend with Microsoft/Yahoo has also risen, up from 21% in 2012 to 38% this year.

Similarly, for other search platforms generally, the percentage has increased from 13% in 2012 to 29% this year.

Has your paid search budget for the following search engines increased or decreased this year?

In my work with B2B companies, I spend a lot of time on the phone with salespeople while doing research for the creation of buyer personas and the development of content strategies that dovetail with sales objectives. One of the questions I always ask is for the salesperson to define what they consider to be a qualified lead.

What I still mostly hear is the definition of BANT:

• Budget
• Authority
• Need
• Timing

And salespeople are adamant about these criteria. Most likely willing to wrestle for them :)

Yet, when I interview buyers and customers about their buying process, some of those criteria are found to be, well, bunk. BS. Irrelevant.

Salespeople need to start thinking differently. Unless they do so, BANT will be one of the reasons why the leads marketing passes to them will continue to be considered low quality. This is because today’s markets are dynamic. Buyers have changed, but BANT hasn’t. So some of the BANT criteria for your hottest leads will likely be missing. Thinking this means the leads aren’t qualified could be a big mistake.

Let’s take a look at why BANT needs a bit of renovation.

Budget

Unless you sell something that is a line item for your customers, it’s highly likely that budget may not exist until after the business case has been built. Why? Because when the budget was developed 8 or 9 months ago, they hadn’t recognized the need to solve the problem – or even that the problem existed. But it can also point to a larger problem that needs to be solved that may be pulling funding from across lines of business, so it’s not evident where the money is coming from.

In fact, 48% of buyers surveyed by DemandGen Report say their purchase of a complex B2B product/solution was initially unbudgeted. According to the report, “[the purchases] were deemed necessary after looking at the solution’s impact on other adopters and building an internal business case for the solution.” Only 11% said so in 2011, showing just how much the budgeting process is shifting.

When you consider that another 14% say the budget was determined after soliciting multiple bids, that means 62% of purchases were made without an initial budget in place.

Budget is no longer a static criterion that sellers can expect to see in place. This makes it a bit moot as a qualifier. Perhaps it would be better to evaluate the company or account to determine if they could buy from you if they decide it’s a worthwhile choice. Company characteristics might be better drivers than budget. Then again, that puts the onus on your company to do the heavy lifting to make it so.

Authority

This is one that makes me grit my teeth. Salespeople all want to speak to the person that signs on the dotted line. (We need a CIO persona is something I hear a lot) But, guess what? That person isn’t usually the one building a relationship with your company or reading your content, attending your webinars or sharing your infographics. Nearly all the executives I speak with who have signing authority are too busy to do their own research or talk to vendors until the short list is formed.They put that responsibility onto their staff. And I’d suggest you make friends.

Depending on which research you believe, there are 7 to 21 people involved in a complex buying decision. Maybe only 1 of those people can sign off, but if a bunch of them say “NO” then you’re out. Instead, it would behoove you to understand the hierarchy of the buying committee and what each of them cares most about. (Personas) Choose wisely based on influence level.

In my opinion, authority is also a rather dynamic term these days. Considering that most of the people I interview say they turn first to colleagues and peers for referrals, their authority shouldn’t be under estimated, either. In fact, think cultivation; it’s much more productive.

Only 9% of the 170 B2B buyers who responded to the DemandGen Report survey represented themselves as buyers who allocated or approved budgets. Most of the rest regarded themselves as influencers and recommenders. And 50% of overall responders say they’re inviting more internal members to the input party.

Need

This one is probably the most valid of the BANT criteria for without it there’s no possiblity of making a sale. But think carefully about how you define this; is it a need or really a want? How important is the problem that’s being solved in the scheme of things? For the buyer? In relation to company objectives?

I agree with this criteria. It needs to be there. This being said, it’s important to realize that it may not look like what you expect. Developing buying insights about how the different members of the buying committee view the issues they’re trying to resolve is critical to aligning conversations that are relevant – as well as for lead qualification.

For example, I just did a round of interviews where the customers were almost always switching from one vendor to another. The problem being resolved? Responsiveness and a consultative approach by the vendor they selected to help them improve related processes and workflows. Their current vendor’s solution was fine, it was their attitude that needed adjusting. There’s a different approach to this issue than the one you might have thought of originally when trying to prove your solution was a worthwhile investment. What if it’s not about that?

Timing

Salespeople are driven by urgency. They need to close deals in short windows. One salesperson told me recently that without an established deadline, he wasn’t interested. Yikes. I get it – really I do. Salespeople have quotas to meet at the end of the month. But, given the way the other criteria have changed, there needs to be a plan. I’ve seen deals that were projected to close in 30 days drag on for months and deals projected at 6 months out close in 30 days.

Business needs evolve quickly. There can be a long period of feet dragging, but once everything clicks into place, then things can happen pretty fast. The issue here is who’s going to get everything to click into place? If not you, then it will be a competitor that sees what could be hidden potential.

Do you know where the value levers are for each member of the buying committee? How can you pull them in a way that gets each of them to convince the others? Rather than relying on the prospect for the urgency, perhaps that’s something we should be bringing to the table.

No – not with desperate attempts to close a prospect that’s not ready, but by showing them the value of the impact they’re unable to have today—without our solution.

The Need for Dynamic Criteria

So, if not BANT, then what?

The main difference between what worked in the past and what works now is how dynamic the business environment has become. Speed of change is crazy. We need qualified lead criteria that can continually shift in response to changing buyer situations and behavior patterns. I don’t have all the answers, but here are a few ways to look at some criteria I’m seeing have more impact in lead quality definition in today’s markets.

• Need stays - but I’d work on defining which types of need are a sweet spot for your customers. All needs are not pivot points for success. And one need doesn’t look the same across the stakeholder group, depending on roles and responsibilities of who interacts with your company. How might “need” be defined better? Has something changed recently that reframes a need you fulfill?

 

• Connections - if the prospect you have access to isn’t the one who can make the decision, does he/she have a direct connection to who can? How many contacts from the prospective company are in your database? What type of organizational hierarchy are they dealing with? Which one has the perspective that will allow for the most urgency to be recognized based on value add?

 

 

• Company - how closely does the company resemble your best customers? In other words, even if the contact you have is interactive, interested and highly engaged, if the company isn’t a good fit and won’t likely buy from you then you’re wasting your time, no matter how great the lead score. Additionally, if you don’t have other customers in the prospect’s industry, can you prove your solution will be relevant for them? Based on what? How will you convince them that your expertise will continue to pay off after the purchase is completed?

 

What do you think? What would you add to this list?

In a recent 1to1 Magazine article, industry pros discuss their most influential demand generation strategies for finding and closing highly qualified leads. Tim Riesterer, chief strategy and marketing officer at Corporate Visions, explains that organizations have left out the human factor from their demand generation process, which produces too many unresponsive and unqualified leads for sales teams to sort through. What should companies do to prevent this? Read on to discover “The Top 5 Demand Generation Strategies,” as featured on www.1to1media.com.

The Top 5 Demand Generation Strategies (originally published on 7/1/13 in 1to1 Magazine)
By Cynthia Clark

A changing customer journey and a tough economy are pushing organizations to press their marketing departments for as many highly qualified leads as possible. Experts share their secrets for nurturing the right leads and turning them into customers.

Demand generation is a crucial exercise for organizations. In fact, according to the 2012 B2B Demand Generation Benchmark Survey, carried out by Software Advice, Eloqua, and CMO.com last fall, the majority of organizations—62 percent—planned to spend more on demand generation in 2013 than they did last year, with retargeting advertising and social media being the two channels where the highest number of respondents were planning to increase their spend.

But with customers spending more time doing their own research, marketing’s job in identifying and nurturing leads is becoming more difficult. According to The Digital Evolution in B2B Marketing carried out by the Corporate Executive Board and Google, customers tend to go through almost 60 percent of the sales process before engaging a sales representative. This new phenomenon poses a big challenge for organizations, putting them in a situation where they’re no longer in control of the information that prospects are receiving about the products and services for which they’ve expressed an interest.

As Lisa Arthur, CMO of Teradata Applications, puts it, customers want to hear something they don’t already know from sales teams. “Today’s sales people are expected to educate and provide new and provocative perspectives on the market and technology solutions,” Arthur notes. Further, customers expect a more personalized interaction from organizations. “Sometimes marketers rush the relationship when instead they should be more focused on building a relationship with the customer,” says Terry Arnold, vice president of contact center solutions at Harte-Hanks. Experts share their top demand generation strategies for fostering and nurturing relationships with prospects.

• Define your goals: Debbie Qaqish, chief strategy officer at The Pedowitz Group, stresses the importance for      each company to clearly outline the goals of its demand generation program. “This might sound simplistic, but many times we walk into a company and they don’t know why they’re engaging in demand generation,” she notes. Qaqish notes that one of the first steps is to define the goal of the program and include the most critical metrics and key performance indicators that will be used to measure the project’s success. “Have a goal and have the metrics to support it,” she notes. Qaqish also emphasizes the importance of having a demand generation strategy that addresses every step of the buying cycle. Further, companies need to really understand who their buyers are. As Greg Ott, CMO of Demandbase, puts it, organizations need to pose this question: ”Who do we sell to?” Ott notes that for most companies, the vast majority of future revenues will be coming from companies which have similar attributes to ones they’ve done business with in the past. ”The tighter you focus your demand gen efforts against a defined audience, the faster you’ll be able to determine the best way to engage and penetrate accounts, be it inbound and content marketing efforts, or outbound email, telemarketing, and conferences,” he notes.

 

• Engage in a digital one-to-one conversation: Although customers are going through the majority of the buy cycle without engaging directly with the organization, businesses need to make sure they read the signs that customers are sending and reach out to them at the most appropriate moments and with the right information      that will add value. Lisa Cramer, president and co-founder of LeadLife Solutions, notes that organizations cannot wait until a customer is ready to contact the company, but need to be involved in the purchasing journey from the start. “The challenge is to understand who the buyer is, where they are in the sales cycle, and then nurture a relationship with them,” says Cramer. Therefore organizations need to have the tools in place to understand customers’ buying journeys. For example, if a customer is downloading white papers but hasn’t visited any product pages or case studies, he’s still early in the buying cycle. Cramer stresses the need to send customers information      that resonates with each particular point in their journey and engage them in a conversation, helping develop a rapport between the brand and the customer. Further, organizations need to identify hand raisers and be prepared to contact them with the most relevant information. Sales people have to be ready with the necessary information before potential buyers raise their hands. They should also be ready to interact with them with the information that they will find relevant as soon as this happens.

 

• Focus on the right content at the right time: Having the right content is imperative in making sure that prospects don’t lose interest in an organization but continue to consider doing business with a particular firm. Many brands are focusing on creating the right content that will help prospects better understand the company’s products and solutions and how these could be beneficial. “At all stages of the funnel it’s about putting the right message in      front of someone at the right time, and making the message more about their needs and insights, and less talking about ourselves,” notes Demandbase’s Ott. Claudine Bianchi, CMO at Axceler, explains that the company improved its blog and social media presence in order to deliver the best content. She warns against sending information that prospects aren’t ready for since this might confuse them or even scare them away. “You need to educate customers,” she says. The Pedowitz Group’s Qaqish highlights the need to develop specific personas and then create content that is relevant to these customers. “Understand who you’re talking to and what’s important for them, she says. Ott uses the example of software company ArcSight, which has been acquired by HP. ArcSight used website personalization so that when, for example, healthcare prospects visited their site, they showed a Boston Medical Center case study while financial services companies were offered a banking case study. These simple tweaks lead to a two-fold increase in      click-throughs to the company’s most valuable content, tripled the conversions to leads, and led to a 14-fold increase in return on investment.

 

• Add a layer of human intervention: Organizations tend to make the mistake of automating the whole demand generation process. Tim Riesterer, chief strategy and marketing officer at Corporate Visions, notes that this procedure leads to too many under-qualified, dead, or recycled leads getting into the sales funnel, leading to wasted time for sales teams. Riesterer believes that organizations should add a layer of human intervention to the demand generation process. These special agents will be in charge of speaking with leads and giving them a final qualification and score before determining whether they should be passed on to sales teams. “They would be the final gate,” Riesterer says. He notes that some organizations are setting up teams of specialized agents within their contact centers whose specific responsibility is qualifying leads.

 

• Align sales and marketing: One of the biggest demand generation challenges facing organizations is a lack of alignment between sales and marketing, notes Brad Wamsley, managing director for B2B and technology markets at Mason Zimbler, a Harte-Hanks company. “Especially in an age of marketing automation, sales and marketing alignment can make or break effective lead generation,” Wamsley says. Teradata’s Arthur agrees. “Buyers are smart and they’re making fast decisions,” she says. “It’s critical for sales and marketing to align in order to provide relevant, timely messages to prospects at every stage of the buying cycle.”

Finally, the success of a demand generation strategy depends on knowing customers and prospects and delivering content that’s highly relevant to them. Further, organizations need to understand which touchpoint today’s omnichannel customers prefer to leverage for contact and engagement. “Know your customers, and how they want to be engaged,” Arthur notes.

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Today's blog post is by Anabel de Vetter, Content Creator at Showpad. Some people want us to believe that sales is broken or has completely changed, or even that selling is dead. They believe that buyers spend their days on social media, happily progressing on their buyer journey all by themselves. Should we just let all our good sales reps go and advise them to start a career building Websites? The fact is, there are new tools and technology available to help sales reps get better results: social media to get to know prospects, CRM systems to keep track of...

City staff selected our team for their largest contract ever, but after some behind-the-scenes political maneuvering by a competitor, City Council stunningly overrode their decision.

The oil company's environmental director, a strong ally, told us he was the primary decision maker. But after another firm was selected for the job, we learned that he had only 3 of the total 10 votes. His boss, who we had not met, had 5.

Three members of the selection committee ranked our proposal first; another member picked us third. But the fifth member, unhappy about a perceived slight, gave us a last-place ranking, causing us to finish a narrow second.

These are three of many examples I could offer where the dynamics of what is known as the complex sale prevented me and my colleagues from winning an important contract. If you're not familiar with the term, a complex sale is one in which their are multiple decision makers involved. This, of course, is the norm in the A/E industry.

Yet despite its prevalence, we continue to mishandle the nuances of the complex sale. Over the years, I've worked with many firms on critical sales opportunities. Most of the time, there have been obvious gaps in how well the firm understood or was positioned with key client decision makers. In many cases, the firm didn't even know who the decision makers were.

There's a common tendency to focus the sales effort on one or two individuals within the client organization. These may be people who we've worked with, who seem to like us, who simply are more accessible, or who we happened meet somewhere. Often, we draw conclusions about our chances of success based on interactions with these one or two people, only to learn later that we overlooked or underestimated the role of other key decision makers. I've made that mistake many times myself. 

It's helpful to keep in mind that in a complex sale:

• The different decision makers have different roles within the buying process.

• Each has a different perspective on what's most important.

• There are often relational dynamics that play a large part, whether between you and certain decision makers or among the decision makers themselves.

Recognizing Different Buying Roles

There are four principal roles among the decision makers (or "buyers") you encounter. I like consultant Laura Ricci's acronym BUGS to help remember those roles:

• Bosses. These are the ones who control the purse strings and have approval (or veto) authority. A Boss may be a single individual (e.g., an executive VP) or a group (e.g., City Council). Bosses are often in the background, without an active role in the buying process—until they weigh in on the selection decision. One of the most common mistakes that A/E firms make relative to the complex sale is failing to identify and engage the Boss.

• Users. These are the individuals most directly affected by the buying decision, those who you are likely to work with most and often have a similar technical background. Users typically are the focus of your sales efforts, the buyers you know best and are most comfortable interacting with. You're also more likely to overestimate their role in the buying decision, paying too little attention to other key buyers.

• Gatekeepers. These people monitor whether the process is being followed and determine whether your proposal meets minimum requirements. Examples include purchasing managers and contracting officers. Like bosses, they usually have veto power, but only shared approval authority. The importance of Gatekeepers varies widely among clients: With federal agencies, they may be your primary point of contact during the sales process; with municipalities, they may have only a minimal role. It's important that you understand how much weight they carry in the buying decision.

• Supporters. These are individuals within the client organization who want to see your firm win. They may or may not have a direct role in the selection process, but are at least in a position to influence it to some degree. Of course, having a Supporter can be extremely valuable, but beware of overplaying your hand. Be realistic about the magnitude of this person's influence, and don't take his or her perspective as the final word on what the other buyers are looking for—better to ask them yourself.

Identify and talk to all the key decision makers. If you did nothing more than this, you would place your firm in rare company. Most of the time, your competitors will not have "covered the bases" with the different buying roles.

Uncovering Individual Win-Results

To borrow Miller Heiman's term, win-results are the anticipated results of a sales transaction that constitute a personal win for each individual buyer. In business-to-business sales, we often focus on corporate-level needs and results, giving too little attention to what the people involved want. Uncovering personal win-results adds another level of complexity, of course, because they differ for each buyer involved. A few keys to identifying win-results:

Don't assume win-results based on an individual's job responsibilities. It's easy to conclude that, for example, the purchasing manager cares primarily about saving money and the operations manager is most concerned about performance. But such global assumptions are often misguided. Here's my rule: If you haven't asked, don't assume.

Explore the personal consequences of organizational needs and problems. As I've written in this space before, there is added value in addressing not just technical issues, but the associated human consequences. You'll find that personal win-results are often related to how client problems impact individual buyers. Don't stop short of asking about such personal implications (e.g., "So how does that problem impact your job?").

Addressing Relational Dynamics

The complex sale involves the challenge of not only having to build multiple relationships with each client organization, but having to navigate the sometimes tricky relational dynamics among the buyers. Some buyers run interference for others, especially Bosses. Others want you to believe that they're leading the process when they aren't. Still others simply don't work all that well with their colleagues. So how do you deal with these dilemmas? A few tips:

Work through other buyers to reach the Boss. As noted above, Bosses can be difficult to engage in the sales conversation, and other buyers are sometimes part of the problem. It's usually a good idea to solicit the help of your primary contacts to get access to the Boss. What if they're resistant for whatever reason? Try to make a compelling case for why it's in their interests—and the Boss's—to facilitate that discussion. For example, say a User or Supporter obviously likes your proposed solution. Ask, "Who else in your organization would we need to persuade to make this happen? Can you help get me an audience with them?"

At some point, seek a meeting with the group. Working through conversations with individual buyers has its limitations since ultimately they will make a joint decision. Group dynamics come into play at that point. Better to witness those interactions in person before submitting your proposal. If you can convince the group, you're in a stronger position than trying to accomplish the same through individual conversations. Plus it gives you a chance to observe how the group responds collectively, including interpersonal dynamics, and to help guide them to a consensus.

Don't avoid the buyer who's not your fan. Whether this individual has another favorite firm or has something against yours, you don't want to simply ignore him or her as firms often do. If the buyer prefers a competitor, consider my suggestions for displacing an incumbent. If there's a problem, try to resolve it (directly or indirectly, depending on whether the buyer is willing to acknowledge it). Outline what steps your firm will be taking to shore up any perceived weakness or avoid repeating any perceived past offense.

Make your Supporters look good. Don't settle for simply winning their favor; help them succeed in the eyes of their colleagues. Ask the right questions to expose these opportunities and then respond appropriately. Enthusiastic Supporters can help you navigate many of the relational hurdles you'll encounter among those making the buying decision.

Once you have captured your visitor, all you need to do is convert them.  

The old ideas centered around linear conversion funnels and site design are being overtaken by a focus on the customer and their lifecycle with the brand or business.

Here we talk about some of the factors that need to be considered and suggest five proven lifecycle-related campaigns that can be implmented with today's generation of marketing automation services.

Selling to people not pages

One of my Mantras is, 'You can't convert a web page, only the person reading it'. Too often we hear people rattling on about 'website conversion rates', whereas in reality it's people we all aim to influence, persuade and sell to. 

It's about the decision to buy, not the process

In 13 years of looking at how the general public interact with websites one fact has stood out to me, and that is: once someone has it in mind to buy something from a site it is surprising how hard they will try to complete this purchase.

Now this is not to say that usability and good design count for nothing (a misplaced question in a checkout that presumes too much, or a scrambled checkout process will stop people), but it seems clear to me that the trick in getting someone to the point that they want to buy is perhaps more important than the exact tone of purple that the buy button is coloured today.

(Malcolm braces himself from a probable onslaught from the people who know that purple buy buttons never work)...

Relationship first, purchase second

I guess my point is that it's the early stages in the relationship between potential customer and brand that matter most, while the relationship is still tentative and new.

We rarely make important or valuable purchases from people who accost us in the street or bar, because we need to establish a relationship first, to be sure that we feel confident about the product, price and vendor before we part with our hard-earned cash. 

This reinforces the idea that attempting to close a sale every time someone rocks up to your site is at best optimistic,  one needs to first understand the stage in the purchase life-cycle that the individual is at, and then try to interact with them in an appropriate manner.

I think it's also now commonly accepted that the traditional 'purchase funnel' is dead, online we research, select, compare, discover new products, research compare, re-evaluate, select, compare, review in an almost infinite varieties of ways.

Therefore, we need to react to the visitor each time they arrive while bearing in mind the history we have with them, rather than doggedly sticking to some pre-defined purchase process.

The right thing, at the right time

Achieving great conversion is about many factors including design, personalisation, calls to action, messaging, targeting and retargeting and this can be achieved with knowledge about your individual customer or prospect which is both real-time and has their history to hand.

Five hot conversion optimisation campaigns

Armed with this data you can create and drive top-notch lifecycle marketing campaigns, and it's important to understand that really simple campaigns when targeted with solid data about the individual, and triggered to fire at exactly the right moment will operate really well.

Conversion rates for targeted individuals in the 30% to 60% range are not uncommon.

Here are a few we've had success with:- 

• Brand lovers: Spot the people who look at a particular brand a lot, and use this knowledge to offer them brand-specific things (that might be a newsletter on the brand, an offer that if they register you will keep them informed of new products from that brand, or even a discount or free P&P deal).

  They will respond as now your are taking about somthing they care about.

• Regular unregistered visitors: If someone has visited the site more than five times, but has not yet registered, then you are missing a trick. They are clearly interested in you – it's high time you were interested in them.

  Pop up a simple one-drop-down-form, asking them to tell you what they are interested in, or what type of buyer they are (e.g. buying for themselves, for children, for their business...).

  This will not be a threat, as you are not asking anything too personal, but it is a great icebreaker that will let you target them better, and move the conversation on next time they come by showing them something relevant, or maybe their answer will prompt you to follow them up via another channel (phone, direct mail etc).

• Landing page personalisation: When someone rocks up, you will know if they're a first timer, where they are in the world, and - if they came searching for something - wht they are looking for (and if they're mobile) – all of these things can drive personalisations which will move the relationship along and improve conversion.

  You would be amazed how well an email with the subject of their search landing in their in-tray will convert.

• Abandoned basket emails: This was the subject of the last blog, it might feel a bit “old-hat” but with conversion rates in the 40% bracket it certainly works.
• Role specific personalisation: If you've managed to segment your visitors (using idea #2) then use that insight to personalise their web pages, emails or even a sales call.

  You probably know enough to put a killer subject line on the emails you send (or in banners you show or the calls you make), and the visitor will get that 'hey, they care about ME' feeling, and you're another step closer to the conversion.

Measurement

Lastly, we need to focus on the “optimisation” part of this story.

If we are aiming to optimise our conversion rates, then we need to measure them – this measurement needs to take into account the difference in conversation between visitors you target and the ones you don't (so you will want segment-specific control groups) and also keep an eye on other factors (like which behaviours lead to conversion, which search terms are used by “converters”).

When you have solid data on these factors, you can use your targeting to encourage the behaviours which have a strong linkage (propensity) to conversion and optimise you SEO and PPC work too, or justify the cost of that 10% off voucher you sent to the Brand Lover.

As with everything in marketing, great results don't come for free, but neither are they blind chance. With today's marketing automation solutions you can “market like a megabrand” and see some of their success too.

Start today!

A review of the following checklist can help you better understand the potential role of Blogging for lead generation for your business.

Do You Have the Blogging Infrastructure?

Whether you are a solopreneur or have hired a workforce, Blogging requires you to setup a framework or Blogging policy to follow. Firstly, you should research into the technicalities of Blogging for lead generation, such as competitive environment, best platform, etc. Then you should analyze your business potential in meeting up with the demanding requirements of corporate Blogging. For example, learning the ins and outs social media marketing or training your staff on it.

Can You Manage Sharing Blog Posts that are Best for Your Business?

Many a times, business owners have what it takes to start Blogging for their business. But they often miss the mark when it comes to identifying the topic category that promises the best returns in terms of high and repeat readership. Without this knowledge, it is not possible to assess whether you have what it takes to create and share content of that specific type or category. For example, your target audience may be interested in specific How-To guides but you may not have sufficient knowledge or expertise in the area to provide them with valuable content. Other examples of different types of blog posts include news items, customer testimonials, product reviews and demonstrations, etc.

Does Your Audience Insight Highlight Its Interest in Blogs?

For businesses that are all geared to start generating leads through Blogging must begin with an analysis of their customer base. This refers to the following categories:

• Business-to-Business (B2B)
• Business-to-Consumer (B2C)

The impact of Blogging is generally higher on a B2C than B2B customer base, mainly because individual customers consistently spend more time in reading and following their favorite blogs. Although some B2B blogs are also doing well, they require a much higher experience, authority, and expertise to build readership among such a target audience.

Are You Passionate About Writing?

Most small or home based business owners are required to create content for their blog on their own. This is mainly because of the limited scope and budget for implementing their content marketing strategies. As a result, it becomes important for business owners to have the writing skills to add value to their blog topic. Sometimes overlooked, the importance of your writing ability is such that it can bring either success or failure to your Blogging efforts and goals.

Do You Have What It Takes To Create Compelling Blog Posts?

In relation to the point above, Blogging is not only about writing and sharing innovative and valuable content. In order to make it truly compelling for the target audience, you must have the skills to develop an attention-grabbing blog layout, design, and format.

Can You Meet Your Need to Outsource Blog Writing?

Many entrepreneurs running small businesses tend to rely on their own content writing and curation skills. However, this is not a good idea for all of them mainly when there is a lack of the necessary aptitude for Blogging. It may even have the potential to work for personal blogs but when it comes to the business objective of generating potential leads, it is imperative to strive for creating high quality content. This is why many businesses resort to outsourcing their blog writing.

But the big question is if you have the budget for it or not. You might find many low-price alternatives to hand your project to, but they may fail to live up to their promises of creating original and good quality content. This is why you need to research well into appropriate options and then review the financial capacity of your business.

Can You Afford Your Desired Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Visibility?

If you think you can afford to hire an outsourced professional or company to meet your Blogging and content-creation requirements, then you must be prepared to invest further for SEO and a high SERP visibility. This means that it is not a one-time investment in getting content written for your blog. You will need to have a budget plan worked out for the coming months so as to avail the benefits of your initial Blogging investment.

Do You Have the Time to Follow Your Blogging Schedule?

Once you ensure that your business has all the necessary elements for effective Blogging to generate leads, you will need to pay due attention to the importance of time. It is not possible for businesses to generate leads without building a strong readership along with regular or repeat followers. This is possible only when you blog with a predetermined schedule. Haphazard Blogging may help you a little in getting closer to goals like creating online presence, spreading brand awareness, etc. But to generate leads, you will have to commit a certain amount of time in completing the different Blogging steps and tasks.

Are You Ready to Be Active On Other Social Media Marketing Sources?

Attracting traffic to your blog is a prerequisite to your objective of generating leads. In order to increase your blog’s traffic, you will have to be tech-savvy, active on other blog sites, responsive to comments and feedback, proactive in initiating conversation, leaving your comments with valuable information, and so on. This means that other than the time required for your own Blogging schedule, you must have the time to perform regular and compelling activities on various social media sources.

Can You Afford to Be Patient?

Blogging is a promising tool for online lead generation but requires time and patience till measurable results become visible. In Blogging terms, patience refers to perseverance towards continuous content creation, sharing, and related SEO investment. This means that you must assess your assigned budget in the initial and following Blogging expenses.

In short, you should never make a hasty decision about starting your business blog with the aim of generating leads in the future. This is because Blogging might not be as effective for your business as it has been for others. You should always assess its requirements against your capacity so as to make an informed decision.

From 2009 to 2012 I ran a social media marketing company that focused on building sweepstakes for brands. During that time, I pitched my services to thousands of companies.

Thousands of those emails went unanswered.

Hundreds of those emails were answered though—and led to sales. Below is what I learned about how to get leads, connect with those leads, and convert those leads into sales. I’ll share what worked, what didn’t work, and how you can use these tactics in your own sales process.

1. The cold email pitch

Let’s discuss cold emailing first because it is one of the most widely used tactics in the sales process, and it is also one of the worst ways to get a lead if it’s not done properly. A cold email is an introduction or pitch to a stranger that is unsolicited or unexpected, so it’s really easy to mess up.

When sending a cold email, here is what not to do:

1. Find prospect’s email address
   
2. Copy and paste in a pre-written email
3. Click send
4. Cross fingers and hope they respond (they won’t)

I’m embarrassed to admit that I have done this hundreds of times—I’m sure you’re no stranger to this either. If you have done this before, you know that 99% of the time it doesn’t work. People see right through these emails and they end up in the trash or even worse: marked as spam.

With that said, if you are going to send the cold email and want to increase your chances of getting a response, here is what you should do:

Keep it short

I recommend 4 to 6 sentences. Don’t send five paragraphs as your first email. This is the most important thing to remember when sending a cold email.

Reminder: Keep. It. Short.

Find their name

The least you can do is know the name of the person you want to email. Do not use “to whom it may concern” or “hello sir/ma’am”. Do your due diligence and find your contact on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, etc. to get their name and a deeper understanding of who they are. There is no excuse for not using a name in the email.

Sometimes you will find your new contact’s name, but not their email. A tactic I’ve found effective is to use Rapportive to verify their email address through the magic of a little elbow grease. After you get the person’s name, you can probably guess a few variations of what their email might be.

For instance, if we want to contact Paul Graham from Y Combinator, we might first guess a few email addresses: paul@ycombinator, paulgraham@ycombinator, and pg@ycombinator. When you find the right email, Rapportive will show you profiles connected to that account; from Twitter to LinkedIn to AngelList. This is a very effective way to find the email of someone within a large organization.

Mention their company

This is a no-brainer, but be sure to use the name of the company that you are contacting in the body of the email. This email is about them and how you can benefit them, so personalize your message! Do you want it to feel like you’re sending the same email to hundreds of other people? Of course not.

Tell them exactly how you can help

Let me emphasize: tell them exactly how you can help.

There needs to be a specific course of action for them to follow, and they need to know exactly what to expect back from you. If this person is worth your time as a prospect, then make sure you are also worth their time by taking a look at their website or blog, so you know exactly what you can do for them.

Be specific. Don’t leave things open ended by saying, “Let’s see how our businesses can work together, I think our service can solve some of your problems.” Instead, you should say (for example), “I saw your tweet about the hassle of manually processing payroll. Our service solves your problem by automatically processing payroll for you every month with the click of a button. Do you have some time this Tuesday at 12PM to talk about how we can help?”

Tell them exactly what you want

Be precise and tell your prospect exactly what you are looking for. Do not confuse them with multiple questions; this can make them unsure of how to reply. Ask for what you want and make it easy for them to say “yes” or “no”. Even if they say “no”, you can move onto your next prospect and follow up when you can provide what they need.

2. Get the key to their inbox

Inboxes are sacred. Your inbox is like your home on the internet; you want to know who’s going to be visiting and you only want important and valuable things inside. You don’t like unexpected visitors, and it takes effort to keep it clean.

There are several social networks you can utilize to research your prospect and get an invitation into their ‘home.’ My favorite social sites for research are Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Twitter

Follow your prospect on twitter. Read their tweets, retweet them and favorite their tweets. After a few days (at minimum), send them a tweet asking if you can shoot them an email. I’ve found this to work well:

“Hey [name], I would love to chat about how I can help you with [pain point/problem]. What is the best email to reach you at?”

If all three scenarios below are true, then this tactic will work 95% of the time:

1. The person you are contacting is not a celebrity or popular figure with thousands of followers receiving thousands of @ replies and direct messages.
2. The person has actively tweeted within the last month. If they have not, they probably are not using Twitter often.
3. The person is engaging in conversation, sending out tweets and @ replies to people. If all of their tweets are self-promotion, you probably won’t get a response.

If these three things are true, then you’re good to go. I’ve done this many times, and the person will usually tweet back with their email; or they will send it in a direct message. Once you get that email address, it’s fair game – you’ve just been granted the key to their home (but don’t abuse the privilege).

When contacting them, be sure to mention in your opening sentence how you got their email. For example:

Hey [name], This is [name], we spoke via Twitter [link to the twitter conversation]. Thanks for getting back to me.

I used this very tactic to get a customer who ended up turning into my #1 client, paying for my services for over 2 years.

Facebook

This hasn’t really been a good method of contact up until the release of timeline for businesses. Sure, you can randomly friend your prospect or message them, but Facebook is largely reserved for personal use with friends and family. If all else fails, contacting your prospect on their personal profile should be your last resort.

When it comes to reaching out to businesses on Facebook, you don’t want to expose yourself to the public by posting on a company’s wall asking for their contact information, that’s amateur. With the addition of timeline for businesses, you can message any business – in private.

Look for the ‘Message’ button at the top of the company’s Facebook page. This has garnered a response every single time I’ve used it.

I suggest asking for a contact email up front, so you can take the conversation off of Facebook. Keep in mind that Facebook allows brands to disable this feature, so some pages might not have it.

Remember, once you get that email address, your opening line should mention that you received their email via correspondence on Facebook.

LinkedIn

Not only is LinkedIn built for business professionals, but it is very easy to get an email address because contact information is displayed on a users profile, making it one of the best networks to utilize. Do not abuse this opportunity. Usually, I will add someone as a connection on LinkedIn and, once they accept me, I’ll inbox them to introduce myself and ask permission to shoot them an email. Once they grant me permission, they’re much more receptive to receiving an email from me.

3. Make a personal or business connection

This is building off some of the cold email tactics, but a soft introduction is a lot more personalized and you are incorporating observations or commentary into your email that helps your prospect relate to you. The emails I’ve sent with the highest response rate mention how I read about or saw their company featured somewhere I read frequently.

For example, if your email says that you read about their company in an industry-specific magazine, they will immediately be able to relate to you. The same idea applies to catching your prospect featured on a blog or seeing their advertising on one of your favorite websites. In order to really step it up a notch, link to the place you saw them featured, and make a couple thoughtful comments.

Doing a little research on your prospect can be a powerful way to connect with them on a personal level.

Recently, someone signed up for a free trial of ViralSweep, so I already had their email address and company information handy. I googled their email address and found out that they were born in Italy. My father was also born in Italy, so I was able to use this as a hook in my email to connect with them on a personal level. Guess what? They responded, and they’re using the service.

4. Get referrals from friends

Utilizing your current connections to get you in the door with your prospect can be extremely valuable, but most people forget to do this — rather, they’re scared to. Don’t be afraid to ask your friends and family about people they know, and be sure to utilize LinkedIn and Facebook to see mutual friends.

When I first got started in marketing, I reached out to all of my friends, asking them if they knew anyone who ran a business selling products, or if their family members knew anyone. Turns out, I had quite a few friends who had some connections and they hooked me up. Getting that referral made my pitch very simple and it usually went something like this:

Hi [name], Our mutual friend [name] told me about your company and said that you were looking for some social media marketing help…

This person now knows that a mutual friend referred me to them, which vets me and creates a sense of pressure for them to respond. Utilizing referrals from friends and family are what drove most of my initial sales when I started marketing my company.

5. If you don’t ask, you won’t receive

Similar to getting referrals from friends, you can also leverage your audience or clients for referrals. If you already have clients or an audience, you should be asking them for referrals. Again, people forget to do this and it boggles my mind. Remember, if you don’t ask, you won’t receive.

You could be leaving money on the table by not simply asking for it. The worst that can happen is someone says, “no.”

Since I was building and promoting sweepstakes for brands, I was fortunate enough to have built up a large email list with both my audience and my clients. To ask for referrals, I shot off separate emails to my audience and to my clients. The one to my audience was called, “I’m giving back” and the one to my clients was called, “A special gift for your business”.

In the email that went out to my audience, I thanked them for being loyal followers — always engaging deeply with the promotions that I was running for my clients. Then I said I wanted to give back to them for helping me out, and explained that if they knew anyone who owned a business and introduced me, I would give them 50% of the sale they helped make. It turned out that one of my followers had a friend at Snyder’s of Hanover Pretzel Company and I managed to get them as a client. Having just started out, getting a company like that was a big deal to me.

In the email that went out to my clients, I thanked them for their business and offered them 25% off my services in return for quality referrals. This tactic ended up netting me several new clients. Not bad for $0 in marketing.

6. Organize Your Emails

Following up with your prospects is extremely important and if you are not doing it, you’re really missing out on a huge opportunity for your business. Follow-ups accounted for about 20% of my overall business, and the reason is simple: people are busy and if there is no sense of urgency, they forget to act. Some call this an email “drip.”

I make sure never to forget about my prospects, and I always check in periodically to give them the nudge they need to move forward. Here are some tips to help you manage following up with potential clients:

Create labels

Using Gmail, you can create labels to “bucket” your emails. To make it easier to segment potential clients and current clients, I set up labels like [Potential Clients 2013] and [Current Clients 2013].

Every time someone emails me and expresses any interest in my service, or I pitched them and they showed interest but never followed back up, I’ll toss them in the [Potential Clients 2013] folder. Then I make it a habit every few months to go back into that folder and follow up with those people. As soon as someone becomes a client, I’ll place them in the [Current Clients 2013] folder.

My methods are sustainable for me, but as a business grows, it becomes difficult to keep track of each lead and where they are in your sales funnel. There are apps like Streak that help streamline the email drip and sales funnel.

Use Boomerang

Install Boomerang for Gmail. Boomerang allows you to schedule emails and have emails re-appear in your inbox if you don’t hear back from someone for a certain period of time. Remember, you need to categorize these emails with labels so that you will be able to keep track of who you need to follow up with.

Try ToutApp

If you’re looking for a better way to streamline your email sales process, then I highly recommend using ToutApp. They integrate with Gmail, Outlook and a bunch of other existing tools and they help you write effective sales emails, follow up intelligently with prospects, and you can even track if someone opened or clicked the links in your email.

7. Don’t go for the hard sell at first, UNLESS they ask for it

If someone is showing interest in your business, you may scare them away if you immediately go for the hard sell. I’ve made this mistake so many times and I have learned a lot from it. New customers do not yet know enough about you or your business to trust you. As David Passiak says, establish trust first, sell second.

If you have a lead, establish loyalty and get them to trust you first.

You need to get them to realize you are an authority when it comes to your niche and that you will be able to solve their problems. More importantly, get them to talk about their pain points and be a good listener.

Here are two examples that have happened to me in the past and I’ll tell you what worked, and what didn’t.

Example 1 – What I did wrong

I created a lead generation form for an advertisement I was running. Hundreds of people were signing up on this form to learn more about my social media marketing service. They gave their full name, company website, phone number, and email address.

I ended up emailing almost half of those leads with a standard pitch. These people were interested in my services so it would be an easy sell, right?

WRONG.

I took a quick look at the website of each lead and in my introductory sentence reminded them where I got their information from. I then went on to say that I looked at their website and based on what I saw I could help them for $XXX amount.

One person responded out of the 50 emails that I sent. These people were warm leads, they signed up on my form, why were they not responding?

“I didn’t try to close too early, like a nineteen-year-old guy; I made sure to invest in the relationship first.”
—Gary Vaynerchuk

It’s because I went for the sale way too soon in the relationship. Picture it like this: you walk up to someone in a bar and your opening line is, “hey, want to come home with me?” You haven’t even met yet and you’re already trying to get them in bed, it just doesn’t work.

Example 2 – What I did right

After emailing the first 50 leads and noticing the abysmal response rate, I decided to try something different. Instead of mentioning how I could help them or what my prices were, I simply went to their website and did a little research. Then I sent them an email asking questions like, “how did you come up with this idea, where is it currently sold, how are you acquiring customers, and what are your current marketing goals?”

People love to talk about themselves and nearly everyone I sent that to responded. Instead of selling to them right off the bat, I got them to talk about themselves first and all I had to do was listen.

This allowed me to learn about their business and have them talk about the problems that their business was encountering. My follow up emails helped to establish a relationship of loyalty and trust as they realized I was someone who could help them. This relationship is what allowed me to convert many of those leads into customers.

8. Make guarantees

This tip may not work for everyone, but if you run a business that can guarantee results, then why not make a guarantee up front?

For example, I put the time into building an incredibly engaged audience, so I knew that the promotions I was building for clients would get thousands of entries, hundreds of email subscribers, Facebook likes, and Twitter followers, so I was able to guarantee results.

I would tell my clients that if I didn’t achieve certain results, the promotion was free.

I already knew from my past that any promotion I ran would achieve the results I was promising, so I was going to get paid. My clients, however, did not know this and they were more than happy to use a service without paying up front. Once I delivered upon the promised results, I would just send an invoice to the client to collect on the guarantee that I made. I used this tactic for a while and it did very well, opening the door to many sales.

My pitch for this was short and to the point. I introduced myself, my business, and I told them that I could offer guaranteed results on their first promotion or they wouldn’t have to pay a penny. I would guarantee a certain amount of email subscribers, Twitter followers, and Facebook likes. Many businesses agreed to this because there was no upfront risk for them and they knew that I would have to do my best to deliver on my promise.

This worked very well, but here are a few tips to keep in mind if you plan on making any guarantees:

Set restrictions

Tell your client that you will only offer guaranteed results the first time around. I made sure to set the bar low so my clients would be amazed when I over-delivered. You are basically using this as a way to get to them to try your service and become hooked on it once they see the results.

Keep in mind, you don’t want to continuously guarantee results for the same clients. I made this mistake with the first two clients I tried this on, which leads me to my next point.

Law of diminishing returns

Keep in mind the law of diminishing returns. I made this mistake by over promising and over delivering with my first two clients. When they came back for a second time wanting the same guaranteed results, I could not offer it to them because my audience was limited to a certain size and I had maxed out the results that I could deliver per promotion.

Under promise, over deliver

Be sure to always under promise and over deliver. You want to set expectations low for your client so that you can make them very happy when you exceed those expectations. If you set the bar high they will only be mildly pleased when you deliver on the promised results, and it places you in a tough position if you happen to have a slow day.

9. Offer a free trial

This tip is common sense, but I see way too many SaaS companies that don’t offer a free trial. Provide a potential customer a free trial; whether it is 14 days, 30 days or a lifetime free trial with restrictions. The goal is to get them to try out your product without any risks.

Give your customer an amazing first taste.

Make it as easy as possible for someone to use your product. Often, this means giving them access before having to create an account or input their credit card.

When it comes to requiring a credit card for a free trial, run an A/B test. Run two variations of your page, one offering a free trial with no credit card required, and one with a free trial requiring a credit card. See which version brings more signups, usage, and revenue.

From my own tests, removing the requirement of a credit card for a free trial drastically increased signups. This allowed me to reach out to more people who were interested in the service, rather than having tons of people bounce from my site when they were asked for a credit card.

10. Impulse purchases

There are several ways for you to create a sense of urgency in order to get sales. Here are a few ways to get impulse purchases:

Dimesale

Depending on your product or service, you may be able to do a dimesale. A dimesale is when the cost of a product or service increases in price based on the number of sales. This is a very effective way to motivate buyers to purchase quickly.

For example, say you are doing a public launch of your product or service for the first time, you can use a dimesale to create a sense of urgency so that people purchase immediately. If your product starts at $25, you can set it up so that after the first 10 purchases, the price goes up to $30. After the next 10 purchases the price goes up to $35, and so on. A lot of internet marketers use a dimesale when they launch their products in order to rapidly bring in sales.

Limited time discounts

Discounts are a great way to create a sense of urgency and many companies use this tactic from time to time to boost sales. Be sure to provide people with the discount amount, how they can get the discount, and when the discount will expire. I recommend making the discount last 24-72 hours; anything longer than that does not create a sense of urgency.

Remember, don’t make it a habit to offer discounts or you will end up devaluing your product or service and people will always want a discount.

Exclusive offers

Depending on what it is your company sells, you may be able to create exclusive offers for your customers. Exclusive offers should have a deadline on them in order to create a sense of urgency.

Here is a real world example of an exclusive offer that actually happened to me:

I signed up for Crazy Egg’s basic plan, and right before it brought me to the dashboard, an exclusive offer popped up. I can’t remember the exact offer, but it was something like $69 for 1 year of Crazy Egg, which was an insane deal. The offer box said that if I closed out, I would never see that deal again. The offer was too good to pass up, and I purchased it on the spot.

If you sell a product, BOGO offers (buy one get one free; buy one get one half off) work really well. Bodybuilding.com runs a lot of these offers on their products, where if you buy a certain supplement, you’ll get another one for free. When considering a BOGO you need to make sure your margins are good enough that you won’t be losing money, and you need to put a time restriction on it so that the offer is only good for a short period of time. In the offer below, if you purchase CON-CRET for $28.98, you will get their PEAK 400 product (which sells for $24.87) for free.

11. Avoid the shotgun approach—utilize the rifle approach

Every marketing newcomer will probably try the shotgun approach first, trying to get as many leads or sales as possible without focusing on a specific target. If your product or service has mass appeal this can be viable; otherwise you could be throwing away time and money.

Focus on attracting 1,000 true fans who love your product and will evangelize for you.

The rifle approach is often the cheaper option, but requires more thought and foresight. It fosters a more fanatical customer base who will stick around and spread the word on your behalf. Let’s first take a look at how the shotgun approach is usually used:

Shotgun Example 1: Being Lazy

You craft one pitch and email all of your prospects the same exact pitch hoping that a few respond (like my example at the beginning of the post). None respond.

Shotgun Example 2: Too Broad

You sell a product for girls ages 18-25 and you want to get more Facebook likes. You purchase a prime-time television ad spot on NBC , hoping that all the eyeballs will lead to more likes and sales. You get neither.

The rifle approach

The rifle approach is much more precise, where you are focusing directly on one specific target that you want to hit (or a goal that you want to achieve). With this approach, you are spending more time finding your ideal customers, but the results are much more effective. Some examples:

Rifle Example 1: Being Helpful

Find someone who is your ideal customer. Read through their website, check their social profiles, and find out what they are up to. You can even use Twitter Search to find people talking about problems that your product or service solves (this will classify them as your ideal customer). You then craft a custom pitch towards this person, mentioning that you are aware of their problem and that you have a solution for them.

Rifle Example 2: Getting Specific

You sell a product for girls ages 18-25 and you want to get more Facebook likes. Instead of purchasing a prime-time television ad spot on NBC for eyeballs, you promote content you know they’ll love on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter driving them to your Facebook page where you engage them.

12. A/B test your pitch

I cannot stress this enough, you need to A/B test your email pitches and the subject lines. Never write just one pitch or subject line and use that one pitch on every single person, unless what you have written works every time.

Over time, each small improvement in your pitch will begin to really move the needle further in your sales funnel.

Depending on the amount of people you are reaching out to, I would suggest writing at least 2 different pitches, and splitting them between two small segmented groups. Find which email converts better and use that moving forward.

Final Thoughts

All of these tips and tactics are a direct result of my own trial and error while building several different businesses over the past 5 years. If you take away anything from this, let it be this:

Do your research, stay organized, utilize your connections, build relationships, and always ask for what you want.

Starbucks cup in header image by Benedik.

This post was originally published on ViralSweep 

Recruiters can glean information on potential hires from pages on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other sites, but assembling the big picture about a prospect can take time. TalentBin draws from social sites and sites that are, well, not social — the U.S. Patent and Trade Office, for instance — and ranks people who fit a recruiter’s parameters.

The San Francisco startup said Tuesday that it has raised $2 million in Series A money, bringing the total raised to $4 million. Lightbank led the round, and Foundation Capital, FundersClub and NEA also contributed. The new money will help the company add salespeople and get TalentBin onto more recruiters’ computer screens. Also the idea is to push into more industries.

TalentBin originated in 2010 as Unvarnished, a site where professionals could post reviews of other professionals, by invitation only. Later that year the company opened up the floodgates for anyone to use and changed its name to Honestly.com. In May 2012, having realized the difficulty of getting people to generate content on the site, the company pivoted to TalentBin to bring in data from lots of already popular sites.

Nowadays, TalentBin has a technical bent to it. It incorporates people’s GitHub forks, Quora answers, StackOverflow answers, Meetup participation and other indicators. Behance and PubMed supply raw information on pharmaceutical, biotechnology and design job candidates, too.

In competing for the attention of recruiters, TalentBin runs up against a few other tools capitalizing on input from multiple websites, including Bullhorn, Gild and Silp. All the same, it does seem like it’s got a wide range of sources that could crawl lots of sites and populate a whole new database of possible job candidates. For recruiters starved for leads, it could be another useful tool.

TalentBin has already gotten traction with more than 200 customers, including some big companies — Amazon.com, Bloomberg, Facebook, Microsoft, UPS. The question is whether TalentBin can build out rich databases of people eligible for work in lower-tech sectors.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• What’s driving the next phase of the e-commerce evolution
• The Xbox One’s role in the TV ecosystem
• Retail’s reinvention: technology’s impact on today’s supply chain

The Most Potent Customer Experience of All written by John Jantsch read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

I was recently talking to a group of small business owners and marketers about the notion of creating a better customer experience and I asked members of the group to share what works for them.

One of the group members confided that while they do lots of things to wow their customers the most profitable thing they do is ask their CEO to write a hand written note of thanks to every customer’s CEO. Not only does this create buzz in throughout the organization it raises the profile of the sales and service people doing the work inside of these organizations.

Genuinely expressing gratitude is one of the best ways possible to create a positive customer experience and it’s such a simple thing to make part of who you are as an organization.

Recently the folks at HelpScout put together a fabulous free ebook with 25 great ways to thank your customers. Sometimes just a little creativity can spark tons of buzz and talk as so few organizations make saying thank you, you know that thing your mom probably taught you about the time you could walk, a part of their marketing follow-up.

We’ve partnered with HelpScout to bring you this important free resource – Go here and grab 25 Ways to Thank Your Customers today – you can thank me later!

Guide by Help Scout, the invisible help desk software for small businesses who care about customer service. Get more free Help Scout content by reading their customer loyalty blog.

A guest post from Gino Wickman, the founder and CEO of EOS Worldwide. We’ve just passed the halfway point of 2013, and here are a couple of thoughts to help you finish the year strong. The average growth rate across all U.S. small businesses last year was 8 percent, according to Libby Bierman, an analyst at Sageworks. I’m proud to say that my clients’ average growth rate for that same period was 18 percent. You might be interested to know that there is a specific reason for this, and it’s three words.At EOS Worldwide, we are obsessed with these three words, and we apply them to everything we do internally as well as externally with our clients to achieve the results that we achieve.I urge you to ponder these three words during your next clarity break and consider how applying them to your organization might have an impact. They are as follows:Real People who value being real are people who are authentic and surround themselves with people who are also genuine and authentic. They lower their guards, are comfortable being themselves with no facades, are capable of being vulnerable, and admit their weaknesses. This typically leads to an environment that is more open and honest, where things move faster. The opposite are people who subscribe to the philosophy of “never let ‘em see you sweat.” They pretend that they are bulletproof, their guards are always up, and they feel that they always must have the answers. This typically leads to a more artificial environment, where things are bureaucratic and political. Are you being real? Simple People who value simplicity are people that believe less is more, love reducing things to their bare essentials, and love rooting out and eliminating complexity. They believe in the 20/80 rule, subscribing to a philosophy of only doing the high-gain 20 percent activity that achieves 80 percent of the results and saying “no” more than they say “yes.” This typically leads to getting more done in less time with less effort and higher profits. The opposite are people who are highly intellectual, love hyper-analyzing everything, love trying everything, love complexity, and are offended by simplicity. This can lead to organizational indigestion and analysis paralysis. Are you keeping it simple? Results People who value results are people who don’t waste time. All of their actions are in alignment with their goals. They make sure that everything they are doing (meetings, conversations, action items, and projects) are in sync with the objective. This typically leads to a high level of achievement and satisfaction. The opposite are people who are afraid to measure, fear accountability, and tend to go through the motions. This typically leads to finger pointing, mediocrity, and “everyone gets a trophy” environments. Are you focused on results? I hope being real, keeping things simple, and focusing on results gives you something to think about for your organization–and life, for that matter. Let us know if we can help. We are at the halfway point! Finish strong and outpace the national average. Fill out the organizational checkup to make sure you are firing on all cylinders. Stay focused, Gino

Social Media Insights is a daily newsletter from Business Insider that collects and delivers the top social media news first thing every morning. You can sign up to receive Social Media Insights here or at the bottom of this post.

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[INFOGRAPHIC] How To Use Social Media For Lead Generation (Wishpond) 
Did you know 77% of consumers say they are more likely to buy from a company whose CEO uses social media? Or, that 90% of B2B marketers are using Facebook, but only 47% of them are using LinkedIn? And other interesting facts > 

Is Facebook Hiding How Many People See Your Posts? (Facebook)
Last week, an article appeared on BuzzFeed claiming that engagement on Facebook (likes, comments, etc.) is actually very low, when you consider how many people saw a post and had a chance to engage with it. The claim was based on a research paper that was published by Facebook's own data scientists and a Stanford University researcher. Lars Backstrom, who works on News Feed at Facebook "every day," responded that the premise of the BuzzFeed article is just plain wrong. He defends the decision to not show how many people have seen a post because, people are more interested in seeing who likes their posts, "rather than just the number of people who saw it … The reality is that we're just trying to show people as many interesting stories as possible." Read >

Note: BI Intelligence will be publishing its own analysis of the Stanford/Facebook study. You can find it on our subscription-only website anytime after 9:30 AM ET today (Tuesday). 

As Facebook Growth Slows, Hoteliers Integrate Other Social Platforms (Hotel News Now) 
According to data from social media analytics company Socialbakers, the number of monthly Facebook users in the U.S. declined by nearly 1.4 million in December 2012. To combat the slowdown, hoteliers are integrating other platforms, such as Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest. Four Seasons launched a top "pin" of the week campaign on Facebook. On Instagram, the brand has weekly themes for followers to participate in like #FSFotogFireworks, which allowed users to hashtag their photos during the Fourth of July. Read >

The World's Most Cross-Channel Digital Consumers Revealed (Turn)
Turn, a cloud marketing platform, has identified what it calls the "Digital Elite." This subset of Web users represent just 2% of the online audience, and yet they are 4x more likely to have a cross-channel experience with brands than everyone else, and are 32x more likely to interact with a brand across three channels than everyone else. In the second quarter of 2013, marketers spent 108% more to reach the "Digital Elite" than other audiences, up 23% from the quarter prior. Read >

One Of The Fastest Growing Pages On Facebook Has To Do With Vine (InsideFacebook)
"Best Vines" is a place online where people post popular video from Vine (a direct competitor to Facebook's Instagram), and it happens to be one of the fastest-growing Facebook pages in the U.S., accumulating 110,000 likes per day. Read >

First Trailer On Instagram Is For The Steve Jobs Movie (Business Insider) 
The filmmakers behind "Jobs," the movie about Steve Jobs, claim to have produced the first-ever movie trailer on Instagram. You can watch the clip, here >

Join the conversation about this story »

How many times have you led a business failure?

Do you have to experience catastrophic failure to be successful?

If I fail more than you, will I ultimately be more successful than you?

These are some of the questions and topics creeping into the blogosphere over the past few years as the notion of failure seems to take on an almost romantic quality. I find this strange. As an entrepreneur, I want to do everything I can to AVOID failure.

Sure, if you are trying something new, you are bound to fail. I fail in some way every single day. But I never want to fail in a way that prevents me from getting back up again. And yet, I have this feeling that if you’ve never been part of an entrepreneurial wipeout, you’re not considered “legit” these days. There seems to be a growing acceptance of The Failure Manifesto.

My podcast partner Tom Webster and I explore this interesting idea on the latest episode of The Marketing Companion. I really think you’ll like this edition, as we explore:

• The romance of catastrophic business failure
• Why Seth Godin’s “Just Ship It” mentality leads to problems
• The true source of business innovation and progress
• The untold side of the Apple story and survivor bias
• The strategy paradox –why we don’t learn from failures
• Why you can’t be Zappos
• Is technology an enabler or a leveler of business innovation?

Do you need to be ”all in” to be successful in business today? I hope you’ll listen to the podcast and tell us what you think!

To listen now:

Other Ways to Listen to the Podcast:

• Click here to download Episode 2 or subscribe in iTunes
• Click here for the show’s RSS feed – for Android listeners.
  

Mark Schaefer is a educator and marketing consultant specializing in social media workshops. He blogs at {grow} and is the author of several best-selling markting books including Return On Influence.

To get referrals that turn into new customers you've got ask the right way at the right time.

Hundreds of "how to" sales books (and the sales trainers who write them) advise sellers to always ask for a referral after you close a sale, like so:

"Thank you for buying! Do you know anyone else who can use our product?"

Unfortunately, this type of request almost never results in a useful referral because it's asking for the wrong thing, in the wrong way, and at the wrong time. Here's a better way:

1. Pre-position the referral.

Asking for a referral when you've just made the sale is asking too much. The new customer has just risked "career points" by buying from you and has no idea whether you can deliver as promised. Why would that he or she risk further "career points" by referring you to a colleague?

Rather than asking for a referral at the point of sale, say something like: "I think you'll be delighted with our product. If that's the case, will you be willing to share your experience with somebody else who might be interested in this product?"

If the answer is yes, say: "Great! Until then, would you be willing to think about who you know who might be interested?" If the answer is "yes," you've pre-positioned that customer to give you a referral.

2. Ask for an introduction.

After enough time has passed so that the customer knows you can deliver as promised, re-contact the customer and confirm that the customer is delighted. If so, remind the customer of his or her commitment to you.

Don't settle for contact information because then you'll just be making another cold call. Ask the existing customer to send an email to the colleague (and if possible a call as well), personally recommending that the colleague speak with you.

The personal introduction is crucial because that's how the existing customer "endorses" you. It tells the potential customer that you can be trusted, which overcomes the barriers of suspicion and unfamiliarity that gum up sales efforts in their early stages.

3. Keep your source informed.

Since your existing customer has spent "career points" recommending you, the existing customer will naturally want to know what resulted from the referral. You start by thanking the existing customer, before you do anything else.

Then, as you develop the relationship with the new potential customers, keep your existing customer "in the loop." Let the existing customer know when you've contacted the new potential customer and whether (and when) that customer buys.

Finally, if the new potential customer DOES buy from you, show your appreciate your existing customer for his or her contribution to your success. Send a hand-written thank-you note or even a small, thoughtful gift.

Like this post? If so, sign up for the free Sales Source newsletter.

Results-driven marketing should be the only type of marketing but often times we’re left with hodgepodge analytics and management.

When HubSpot ran their 2013 Inbound Marketing Report, they unveiled that 18% of marketers reported challenges in gauging ROI and 15% had trouble tracking data. The solution to a large portion of the uncovered challenges is tied directly to incorporating new marketing technologies that help you manage, track and improve your overall inbound and digital marketing efforts.

Strengthen your total content marketing using today’s top marketing technologies.

Content Management System

Providing your marketing, web development and IT team with support through a CMS platform is critical to measuring performance-based marketing. Dynamic content publishing, when coupled with inbound marketing, through a content management system gives all teams real-time performance-based data. With that feedback, you can capture hot keywords or poorly performing pages and build comparative data month after month.

Email Marketing

The hidden gem in digital marketing today is email marketing and if you’re not keeping in touch with your leads through email, someone else will. Email is the preferred method of commercial communication by 74% of adults today (source). Using email marketing as part of a digital strategy encourages deeper engagement and helps both marketers and sales pros alike engage in more customized attention.

Lead Nurturing and Scoring

Lead nurturing and email marketing play hand-in-hand with each other. Once a prospect has converted on an offer through your site, you’ve gained one valuable snippet into their interest and need. Lead nurturing gives your marketing team a chance to nurture based on past interest and deliver follow-up content that makes sense with their interests.

Don’t let your contacts become stale either! As you’re building a database of contacts, you will need a way to prioritize those who are of greatest interest to your sales team. Lead scoring is one marketing technology you can’t live without. Say, for example, you have 150 new leads visiting your site every month. If you spend 20-30 minutes researching each lead to determine if they are worthy to go to your sales team, you could spend up to 75 hours/month prioritizing each potential customer. Integrating effective lead scoring automates this process by giving higher scores to individual attributes that are important to your team ensuring the most valuable leads score the highest, truly a time-saving tool.

Keyword management/SEO

To some, SEO is a mythical animal living in the deep sea. To the rest of us, the only thing certain about SEO is that not much is certain. The #1 spot on Google has a price and we’re all looking to chase after it.

Why, though, do you need a keyword tool?

Monitoring movement around keywords that are critical to your business means the opportunity for more visibility as you increase in your Search Engine Rank Position (SERP).  If you’re not marking where you started and monitoring how you’re growing as you integrate towards full Inbound Marketing, you might miss the drastic improvements you gain as you start to harness search engines.

Social media monitoring

Social media may be a game changer for branding and prospect/lead interaction so don’t short your marketing team by not including social media analytics into your marketing technologies toolbox. Do more for yourself by using a tool that integrates social media monitoring in with your other efforts. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn analytics are good stand-alone starting points but they don’t mesh well into other data you’re trying to collect. Using new marketing technologies, you can view data across all platforms in a simmilar fashion. See? The beginning to very critical metrics all in one location without digging.

Marketing Analytics

There’s nothing more important to marketers than measuring the ROI of each marketing measure. Are you ready for the biggest surprise yet? Google Analytics isn’t enough for measuring the effectiveness of your marketing. Google Analytics gives you very palatable web analytics but those don’t necessarily translate into marketing analytics cleanly all the time.

“Today’s marketing goes beyond the bounds of your website. It’s the intersection of what happens between your marketing channels and the outcome on the other side that provides the most marketing insight.” HubSpot’s blog details the necessity for marketing analytics over web analytics as marketing efforts go beyond web interaction. The data provides a closed loop view at how users (not page viewers) interact and produce results.

That might have been enough to knock you out of your chair. The combined results, statistics and analytics of all of these six technologies provide your marketing team with powerful data that encapsulates your entire content marketing execution. If you’re not evaluating the power of your entire digital marketing strategy with these technologies, you’re missing out on valuable data that directly ties to tracking marketing ROI.

Would you like to take a free test drive of all of these marketing technologies put together in one package? Try HubSpot for free for 30 days and we’ll provide support directly to you.

As an early-stage entrepreneur, you must constantly keep your pitch materials up to date, whether you are seeking venture capital funding now or in the future. Whether investors reach out to you or vice versa, there are certain questions that are almost always asked. In my observations of the startup market — and my experience of the million-dollar seed raise my company completed last year — investors usually end up focusing on three very specific items.

To maximize your company’s chances of pitching your startup successfully and securing venture capital, here are the three questions that every pitch deck should answer:

1. Does it look like your customer base is growing?

If it does not look like your customer base is growing, you are dead in the water. That may be an obvious point, but I cannot tell you how hard it is to communicate customer traction to prospective investors. Investors, like you, have limited time. You need to graphically depict that you are growing in as few words as possible, using a solid visual representation.

We have taken a lot of different cuts at this slide, but the version below seemed to resonate best:

2. Do your customers like your product?

I’m speaking for both B2C and B2B businesses here – you need to be able to demonstrate that your product is getting “stickier” somehow, and the usage patterns of your customers are getting more favorable. In our case, we choose to depict traction in terms of number of pieces of written content our customers purchase from us each month – fortunately, that is trending upward for us:

The reason you need to demonstrate that your product is sticky is simple: acquiring new customers is MUCH more expensive than getting existing customers to pay for your product again. Not only that, but happy customers are also your best salespeople — if you are able to successfully demonstrate that your existing customer base is happy, that in and of itself is a low-cost sales channel. I cannot tell you how often we get asked for the above slide, and we try to update the data on this as frequently as possible.

3. Does it look like your business/product can actually scale?

Remember that venture investors are not interested in ordinary returns — that is why they are in venture capital and not in the S&P 500. If you are not able to demonstrate a clear path to $100M within five years, your company is not a good candidate for venture capital. We constantly get asked about scalability, and truthfully, there is no great answer for any company – all you can do is take your best shot. For us, it is a product slide that looks like this:

We figured out that the bottleneck for our customers creating content was coming up with topics fast enough. We introduced a product (“topic pitching”) that allows our writers to pitch businesses on the fly. It had a nearly 52 percent conversion rate to paid business. Our writers are essentially doing demand generation for us. That is what we want to communicate to potential venture investors, should they come knocking at the right time.

Similarly, your business likely has a “magic” lever that will allow you to reach that 100M in revenue point (a big maybe, I realize) if you keep investing in a certain product, or channel. Once you figure out what the lever is, you need to figure out a way to communicate that.

It never hurts to keep your materials up to date, and it cannot hurt to have the above slides ready at a moment’s notice — should the right investor come along.

Sunil Rajaraman is the founder and CEO of Scripted.com, a marketplace for businesses to hire freelance writers. Scripted.com has a pool of 80,000 freelance writers, and ranks as one of the top five largest writer communities on the Internet. Scripted.com currently provides hundreds of businesses with thousands of blog posts, tweets, press releases and articles each month.

In early silent films, the “chase scene” was a tried-and-true tactic for extending film length. It was also the main reason many viewers paid to go to the theater. A dawdling screenwriter or director might be told, “Cut to the chase!” – literally – by splicing the reel to abruptly introduce the chase scene.

Here are three ways you can cut to the chase…

#1 Match copy to attention span.

Attention spans are shortening. No doubt, you’ve already read the articles and seen the statistics. Here’s a quick reminder:

• Attention spans have shortened from 12 minutes to 5 minutes over the last 10 years.
• Studies have shown that tweets with 100 characters or less receive 17% higher engagement rates than longer tweets.

Cut to the chase in your content writing Ernest Hemingway-style. Take his anecdotally famous six-word story as an example: “For sale: baby shoes, never used.” We can’t all be Seth Godin, but we can at least make experimental forays into Godin-esque brevity, right?

#2 Let readers make inferences.

Not everything has to be said to be understood. Your readers are intelligent; allow them to make inferences that your copy doesn’t explicitly state.

#3 Wow readers with what they want!

Let’s say you’re advertising membership for a meal planning website. You could try selling this way:

“Learn how to prepare delicious, healthy meals at home – no planning or cooking skills necessary. Only $15 per month!”

Meh. Probably not going to pull in a lot of leads.

Or, you could try this line:

“Julia Child visits my kitchen for 50 cents a day. And she’s looking for more work.”

The first example is… well, boring. To make matters worse, it throws everything out on the line. The majority of readers are going to know in a split second whether or not they’re interested in a meal planning service, whether or not it meets their budget, etc.

The second line, on the other hand, tantalizes and intrigues. If a viewer has been frustrated with cooking and meal planning, then this line stands a good chance of resonating, warranting a click through to a fuller page that can provide more information and make the pitch.

A Note on Website Speed

Finally, it’s important to note that it’s not all about your content writing. Website speed and load time plays a significant role in user engagement. According to The Guardian (my emphasis):

Studies have shown that 32% of consumers will start abandoning slow sites between one and five seconds. Bounce rate can be improved by up to 30% with the reduction of page size and resulting speed improvements. A one second delay in page load time can result in 11% fewer page views, 16% decreased customer satisfaction and 7% lost conversions.”

How do you trim down your blog and website content? Share your tips with other readers below.

The monthly board report is an important vehicle for the board-level investors to get a snapshot of how the business is performing and to help the CEO guide the business towards its annual goals.

The typical agenda suggested by Open View Partners (http://blog.openviewpartners.com/baseline-agenda-for-board-meetings/) for expansion stage technology companies is as follows:

1) Market review (Product Management Lead)

• What has changed from the last meeting?
• How is the competitive landscape evolving?
• Why did we win/lose deals?
• Is our market share growing?
• What is the market saying about us?

2) Product review (Product Development Lead)

• How has the product roadmap changed?
• What is our roadmap progress?
• How well is the dev team executing?
• Are we innovating?

3) Sales and marketing review (Sales and Marketing Leads)

• Do we have sufficient pipeline coverage?
• Are the customer acquisition and retention economics improving?
• What is the sales forecast for the quarter (not the CRM forecast)?
• Are we still staffed to hit the revenue targets?

4) Control book financial review (CFO)

• What insights do we derive from the financial metrics?
• How are we progressing against the top five strategic metrics?
• What are the insights from other metrics?
• How is our cash position evolving and are we cash secure?

5) State of the union (CEO)

• What are the CEO top priorities?
• How are we progressing against the strategic initiatives?
• What is the state of our employees and customers?
• What are key hires we need to make?

6) Operations deep dives (functional leaders)

• Deep dive into one or two non-recurring topics.

7) Board matters (CEO and CFO)

Item number three on this agenda covers: pipeline, Lifetime value (LTV), sales forecast and staffing.

When it comes to the pipeline element of this section many expansion stage technology companies report on the sales pipeline. Typically, this looks at the current deals that are being worked by the sales team with some kind of weighting based on confidence levels.

Increasingly, however, board members are looking for information on more than just the sales pipeline. If there has been work done on proper sales and marketing alignment, then the report can include the complete picture from first contact through to imminent sale.

Investors can get 3 key statistics that will help them understand the pipeline better and help them work out what needs to be done to improve:

Statistic 1: % increase in unique visitors

The first contact will increasingly come from online sources as buyers move their early stage behaviour into research mode. Those technology companies who have set up their websites, social medial channels, SEO/PPC, Blogs and campaigns to promote issues-based content will increasingly generate their first-contact online.

Statistic 2: % conversion of visitor to lead

Driving ever-increasing volumes of qualified traffic to online content is of no value if there are no conversion mechanisms that enable the company to exchange content for contact details. The ability to convert traffic to leads at a consistent rate is a fundamental building block of a solid pipeline. Between 2% and 4% is a good average visitor to lead conversion rate.

Statistic 3: % conversion of lead to marketing qualified lead (MQL)

Once the lead is in the system it is critical to have the capability to offer them content related to their area of interest that nurtures them down the pipeline. It is when companies map their content to the stages of buyers’ decision making process and then track its consumption that they can build up evidence of their leads’ readiness for a sales conversation. Developing a consistent rate of conversion of leads into the sales pipeline (MQL) is something that board members should be looking for. Around 10% is a good average lead to MQL conversion rate.

Example: of Marketing pipeline with the 3 main statistics

Inbound Marketing is all about a process that is transparent, predictable and, most importantly, if you are on a fast growth track, scalable

If you would like to listen to our recent Q&A webinar session with experts Johnny Mone of Brightfire and Jeetu Mahtani Managing Director at Hubspot International it’s totally free to access and you can explore further how to:

• Engage with your online audience and speak to their issues
• Create content for conversion
• Convert your audience to leads and sales
• Build your audience and extend your reach

Economists and investors around the world are finally getting used to the idea that China's years of blazing hot growth are a thing of the past.

While GDP will continue to be above average for years to come, China's policymakers are pushing reforms to cool its housing market, legitimize its financial system, reduce corruption, and rebalance its economy as one driven consumption, not exports.

However, the cost of all of these efforts is slower growth. And with public and private financial liabilities sky-high, more and more experts are worried that China will experience a hard landing, a scenario where the economy decelerates to roughly less than 5% causing unemployment to spike and social unrest to sweep the cities.

As you can see from the chart above, GDP expectations are coming down quickly. And behind those numbers are disturbing trends in demographics, credit, housing, and other fundamental factors that are supposed to fuel the Chinese economy.

Private sector leverage is at a level that puts China at risk of a credit crisis.

"Private sector leverage is 17% above trend and on BIS analysis when its gets 10% above trends, there is a risk of a credit crisis."

-Credit Suisse

China's state-owned enterprises have uglier balance sheets than junk-rated US companies.

"China is not unique in having experienced rising corporate leverage in recent years – the same can be seen in other parts of Asia as well as both the US and EM – but the pace and magnitude makes China stand out (see Leveraged China, May 3, 2013). Bottom-up corporate data – less controversial perhaps than the official macro data – suggests that leverage increase has been driven by the SOE sector which on average has tripled leverage in the past five years and which, at 4.6x gross has higher balance sheet leverage than, for instance, US sub-investment grade companies."

"Leverage in the private sector is higher as well, although not as aggressively, and with some dispersion which often relates to the demand trend of the industry. For instance, the property sector which has seen strong sales volumes has maintained more stable credit metrics than, say, the capital goods sector which is suffering from severe excess capacity."

-Morgan Stanley

China has the most levered companies in all of Asia.

"China's corporate sector is the most leveraged and solvency-challenged."

-Stephen Green, Standard Chartered

See the rest of the story at Business Insider