In this post I’m going to share everything I’ve learned about how to build a successful nonprofit blog from the ground up.

For the past two years, I’ve been managing the Wild Apricot blog. This year I’ve taken traffic from 9,000 visitors a month (where I left off last December) to over 36,000. We were even featured as the 14th top nonprofit blog in Feedspot’s Top 75 Nonprofit Blogs of 2017.

This Google Analytics snapshot shows individual sessions, not total blog post views (ex. If one person views 10 posts, it counts as one session).

I didn’t get our blog this far by using vague tips, quick hacks and secret tactics (you’ll likely come across a lot of these). From my experience, it took good old fashioned hard work, consistency, and determination — and that’s what I’m going to share with you.

It’s my hope that in sharing what I’ve learned, it will help you create a successful blog that will have a big impact on the community you serve.

Here’s what I will cover in this post:

• 7 Ways a Blog Will Further Your Cause
• How to Choose Your Blogging Platform
• 3 Places to Find Topics Your Audience Craves
• These 8 Things Will Make Each Blog Post a Success
• This, Above All Else Will Make Your Blog Stand Out
• Visual Marketing Tools to Help Your Blog Posts Pop
• The Best Way to Get Shares and Views to Your Posts
• 6 Places to Find Great Writers if you need help
• The Advice I Wish I Heard When I First Started Blogging

7 Ways a Blog Will Further Your Cause

I hear lots of excuses from nonprofits who don’t blog:

• “What good will it do for us?”
• “Our blog posts never get any attention.”
• “I’m too busy to blog!”

And they’re right. What good will a blog do you, especially if you’re busy with other things, and past attempts didn’t go very far?

If I’ve learned anything from blogging, it’s that a successful blog can change everything — it can drastically boost traffic to your website, triple the amount of email subscribers you have, I even know one small nonprofits that used their blog to double online donations (KnowHowNonprofit even has an easy guide to follow if you want to fundraise on your blog).

Of course, building a successful blog takes hard work, but when done right (which I will try my best to show you in this post), the benefits can be amazing. It can:

1. Attract attention online, including social media. Your blog gives you a place to publish content directly on your site. Then your readers can share your content via email and social media – and that can lead directly to more traffic for you.
2. Tell your story. One of the pillars of nonprofit marketing is smart storytelling, and publishing regular blog posts lets you tell your story and emotionally connect with your readers.
3. Be one of the quickest (and cheapest) ways to spread news about your work, campaigns, events, or any other newsworthy item.
4. Establish your authority in your space. If you’re the new kid on the block, blog posts with great content can help you establish your nonprofit as a group that can be trusted to provide useful, up-to-date information on your cause. For example, Vanessa Chase, one of the experts on nonprofit storytelling helped build her authority from writing over 400 blog posts on storytelling over 4 years. I asked her what advice she’d give to nonprofits looking to blog and here’s what she said:“Blogging is an excellent way for nonprofits to share their expertise in a value-added way that builds relationships with their audience. In this day and age of the Internet, people are seeking authenticity and trust. Content can be a tool that helps your organization achieve both of those goals while becoming an authority on your cause.”
5. Get found in the engines. If you’re publishing great content, other sites will link to you, which will raise your search engine rankings and bring in more traffic, email subscribers, and donors.
6. Build new connections with others in your industry. Simply writing on a topic you have expertise in can bring you attention from other industry experts, organizations, and bloggers.
7. Attract new donors, members, and supporters. Whatever your goals as an organization are, a blog can help attract more people who may believe in your cause and support your efforts.

If you’re sold on why blogging can support your organization, you’re ready to set up your blog. In this next section, I’ll cover the basics of the different blogging platforms.

How to Choose Your Blogging Platform

Why does choosing a blogging platform matter when virtually every website builder offers a blog feature?

It all depends on what your goals are. If your blog’s purpose is to share pictures, then Tumblr may be for you. If you want access to lots of fundraising and sponsorship plugins, WordPress is a better choice.

Whatever your needs, there’s a blogging platform that specializes in them. Here is a list of the most popular blogging platforms, which are all free:

• WordPress: the largest and most comprehensive online blogging platform
• Tumblr: a blogging platform best for pictures
• Blogger: Google’s blogging platform, which makes it easy to setup Google ads
• Medium: a very sleek-looking online publishing platform where people are already searching for great content
• And if you’re looking for more options, CreativeBloq put together a list of their top 14 choices.

If you’re having trouble deciding between choices, most nonprofits end up choosing WordPress. The reason for this is that it’s easy to set up and there are lots of free templates to choose from.

If you end up choosing WordPress, here is a list of helpful tools that can make your nonprofit blog more robust:

• Nonprofit-Specific Themes
• Sponsorship Plugins: add sponsor details onto your blog.
• Event Plugins: include event registration on your blog.
• Donation Plugins: accept donations on your blog.
• Membership, Online Form, and Members-Only Areas: The best option when it comes to building out a membership website is to connect your WordPress site with something called membership management software (or just create your website and blog with membership management software). Integration can be easily and it’s a better way to build out a full membership website (with events, member logins, online payments, and a full contact database), instead of trying to install multiple plugins to do the same thing.

Once you’re setup with your blogging platform, you’re ready to start blogging!

In the next section I’ll cover how to find the right sorts of topics your readers will crave.

3 Places to Find Topics Your Audience Craves

I used to brainstorm topics I thought my audience would be interested in, but it was mostly guess work — sometimes my posts would be a hit, other times not so much.

I was relying on intuition, and it wasn’t working.

Fortunately, I found a smarter way to write about what interests people — I let them tell me what they want.

It’s actually quite simple. It just takes a little listening and a little research.

For example, many people kept asking me where to find a list of free webinars for nonprofits (since we do a monthly free webinar). So, I went and found every free nonprofit webinar I could and published a list. I then shared it with the people who asked me for it. That list ended up doing so well, that I now publish a new list every month. This year alone those webinar lists (here’s an example) received nearly 20,000 views plus thousands of shares across social media.

In the same way, listening to the questions and conversations of the people you’re writing for can guarantee each of your blog posts’ success.

Here are three main places I listen for successful topics:

1. Social Media: Join conversations on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to see what people are talking about and asking. Then write about the most popular topics. Plus, if you see a comment that particularly stands out to you, reach out to that person and ask them to expand on their opinion or story — they may have something interesting to share. With their permission, add it into your blog post.
2. Office Talk: My coworkers are a great source of topics, because they’re interacting with hundreds of nonprofits every day. In the same way, listen to what your coworkers, donors, sponsors, members, and volunteers are chatting about and write about topics that answer their questions.
3. Keywords: Every day millions of people ask Google billions of things. The things they ask are called “keywords” and there are tools that allow you to see which keywords are trending (Mozis a tool I use). If you publish topics that have trending keywords, there’s a good chance a lot of people will find your article on Google.For example, I noticed many people searching for the keyword, “nonprofit event tools.” So, I researched every tool I could find and chatted with an expert event planner to help write the intro. The post ended up getting a couple hundred shares and now it’s the number one post in Google search results for “nonprofit event tools”. Every month it gets over 1,000 views.

From my experience, if you let your audience steer your blog’s content, you’ll end up having an easier time getting shares and views to your posts, because you’re writing about topics they’re actually interested in. Of course, success of your blog will still depend on your ability to deliver “great content” so people actually listen to what you’re saying. In the next section, I’ll cover what I’ve learned to do this.

These 8 Things Will Make Each Blog Post a Success

Everything’s been written before. Take a look at this search for “how to start a blog.” How can you compete with 396 million articles on the same subject? Who’s going to care what you have to say versus everyone else?

I’ve learned it’s possible if you’re willing to do what it takes.

And this is where good old fashioned hard work comes into play.

To stand out, you’ve got to write something better than everyone else — in short, what I call “great content.”

And while “great” is subjective, there is a standard formula I follow every time that I’ve learned works best. You can use these 8 things as your nonprofit blog best practices too:

1. Be useful, emotional, or both. Your blog posts should teach your reader something useful they didn’t know before. If you can do that, your readers will keep coming back for more. If you’re just sharing news, or important information, emotion is the best way to get your point to hit home with your readers.
2. Use Long-form writing. Even in this fast-paced world, people still prefer long-form content of 1000 words and up, and so do the search engines. In fact, posts over 1,000 words in length consistently get shared more. Longer blog posts allow you to dig into a topic with more depth, and that’s what people really want. And if you’re worried about your publishing schedule? Don’t hesitate to cut back on the number of blog posts you publish. It’s better to publish one incredible post every month than four sub-par ones.
3. Tackle complex subjects. When you tackle a meaty topic, you can share your thoughts and provide the information people need, or the stories they need to hear. Don’t stick with simple topics with every article – it’s okay to pick something complicated, then share everything the reader needs (or wants) to know about that topic — kinda like this post!
4. Make it easy to read. Online readers find big blocks of texts intimidating and overwhelming, and they’re more likely to skip an article that doesn’t have any white space. Use subheadings, bulleted lists, and short paragraphs to make your article easy to digest.
5. Consider Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It’s every SEO manager’s dream to get the number one spot on Google for a particular keyword, because it can be the biggest source of traffic for any blog. For example, if you write a blog post called “10 Dog Treats for Puppies” and it gets the number one spot on Google when people search for “Dog Treats”, you can be sure to expect thousands of visitors a day. Of course ranking for any particular keyword is quite difficult, and there are specific things you must include in each blog post in order to rank. If you want to tackle the basics of SEO, WordStream put together an easy-to-follow guide I recommend reading.
6. Write for a niche. A big mistake many bloggers make is to value traffic over conversions — a million views on a blog post about dinosaurs will do nothing to help a nonprofit children’s theater. Your ultimate goal should be to convert a blog visitor into a supporter of your nonprofit. The best way to do this is to write about topics that are very specific to your nonprofit. For example, if you’re a nonprofit children’s theatre in Boston, a good topic to tackle might be, “10 Summer Activities to Do With Your Kids in Boston.” One of the activities in your list can be to attend a show run by your theatre. The traffic to this post can help sell more tickets and sign more kids up to your program.
7. Be competitive. Whatever subject you’re tackling, do a quick Google search and browse through the top posts. What can you do better than them? Perhaps you could include more research, involve the help of an expert, or create a really fun infographic.
8. Only Write When You Have Something Important To Say. This comes from a quote from Ali Mese, a blogging guru: “I will publish an article only when I have something important to say.” It’s as simple as that. If you flood your blog with low-quality posts, your audience may become bored and not bother to read what you’re saying. But if you only write something when you have something actually important and helpful to share, success will naturally follow. In fact, 94% of people will share a blog post they find helpful.

If you’re able to incorporate all eight of these things into every blog post you publish, you’re way ahead of the game. But, there’s still one more thing I’ve learned above all else that helps any post stand out.

This, Above All Else Will Make Your Blog Stand Out

It’s well known that good writing (the ability to create an interesting hook with an exciting payoff) can make any blog post stand out, but it’s also the hardest thing to do.

Unfortunately there’s no quick hack to writing well — I’m still not very good at it, but there’s one thing I learned from my coworker, and bestselling author Donald Cowper, that’s helped me immensely.

It’s to incorporate the elements of storytelling into my posts.

There’s good evidence why this works so well.

Research reveals storytelling helps us better understand key points and enables better recall of those points even weeks later. Plus it makes for a much more enjoyable read.

Imagine this: you run an animal shelter and have a donation campaign coming up. What post do you think people would rather read about?

1. A PR-style post announcing the details of your campaign? (Most blogs would take this approach)
2. An emotional story about a dog’s year-long journey to adoption with a link to donate at the end?

Number two will win every time.

If you need further proof, head on over to Facebook to see what types of articles people are sharing and reading the most.

No matter what type of blog post you’re writing — a list of resources, a how-to guide, an opinion piece, etc., try to find some way to incorporate a story into it. It will make your posts much more memorable.

But, once you’re finished writing your blog post, you still have to engage your readers visually. In the next section I’ll tackle which tools make it easy to create engaging visuals that get shared on social media.

And if you’re looking to get better at writing and storytelling, below are some resources I highly recommend:

• Wired for Story: The Writer’s Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence: a fantastic book on the science behind why we like stories so much with examples.
• How to Write Magnetic Headlines: a great guide with lots of examples.
• Copyblogger’s blog: amazing tips on how to write well. To start, here’s a great post they have on 7 Ways to Improve Your Writing … Right Now.

Visual Marketing Tools to Help Your Blog Posts Pop

Half my posts’ success comes from pairing it with a great image. That’s because great images help posts stand out on social media channels.

In fact, posts with images and videos get shared up to 230% more than those without.

From my own experience, images with big smiling faces get shared the most. Just take a look at the two images below and pick which one you’d share. Both are bright and beautiful, but the one with people in it is so much more engaging.

If you need help creating images for your blog posts, here are some tools that can help:

• Canva: free blog post image templates
• Freepik: free images, cartoons, and vectors to download
• BigStock: purchase credits to download professional images

And if you’re looking for more help to create great posts for social media (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) or to create slideshows and videos, check out this post from social media guru, Julia Campbell, on 10 Inexpensive (or Free) Nonprofit Marketing Tools That Create Stunning Visuals.

The Best Way to Get Shares and Views to Your Posts

When I first started blogging, I struggled to get 100 views and any shares to my blog posts.

Now my posts often receive thousands of views and hundreds of shares. This didn’t happen until I learned to do one thing — and it’s something I don’t see a lot of other bloggers doing.

That thing is to share my blog posts myself.

Every time I publish a post, I immediately share it on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, and in LinkedIn Groups.

But there’s a catch.

Just sharing a link doesn’t do much. To really have an impact, I’ve learned to create a conversation around my blog post.

Here’s an example:

I wrote an article called 24 Things I Wish I Knew Before Entering the Nonprofit World and shared it in a LinkedIn Group I’m a member of. Instead of just pasting the link, I asked a question to get people reflecting on their own careers: “If you could go back in time, what’s one thing you’d tell your younger self about the nonprofit world?”

The result was amazing.

Nearly 100 people liked the post and 26 people commented on it. This resulted in over 1,300 people clicking the link. Other posts in that group shared around the same time barely received any engagement at all.

Since I knew my question got people talking about my post, I replicated the conversation on other social channels too, which created just as much buzz elsewhere.

Creating conversations around blog posts has been the biggest contributor to boosting shares and views of my blog posts.

One way I track total shares of my posts is with a free Google Chrome extension called BuzzSumo. It allows you to see how many shares a page got on Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest. If you also want to see how many Twitter shares your post get, you’ll have to create an account with them.

Of course there are many other tactics that will increase views and shares for each of your blog posts. Here is my list:

• Setup an RSS feed subscription on your blog: subscribers will get email notifications whenever you publish a new post.
• Send out a month blog update: craft an email talking about your best blog post from the month and include links to other helpful blog posts to your email subscribers.
• Include your latest blog posts as a roundup in your monthly newsletter, or publish a monthly roundup of all the best blog posts you’ve come across.
• Work with an industry professional or include a quote from a highly-followed expert. This gives them an incentive to share your post with their network which can widen your reach.

All these tactics just help to amplify the reach of a post. As I said before, good writing trumps everything else.

5 Places to Find Great Writers if you need help

Here are five places (both paid and free) I’ve used to find guest bloggers and freelance writers to help me out.

1. Connections: Ask your friends and colleagues if they know any guest bloggers or freelance writers. You may be surprised how a friend of a friend ends up knowing someone great.
2. Industry Experts: If you know of certain experts in your industry, email them and ask if they’d be willing to guest blog for you. They may not say yes, but you will never know until you ask. Many of the guest blog posts on Wild Apricot are from experts I reached out to.
3. Other Blog Posts You Like: There are likely blogs you already follow. If so, reach out to the writer of that blog and ask if they’d be willing to write for you, or cross-blog one of their posts. With some luck, they may agree!
4. LinkedIn Freelancers: Simply use LinkedIn’s search feature to search for anyone who has the words “Freelance Writer” in their profile. Then, reach out to a few and ask to see their work.
5. Upwork: Upwork is an online marketplace of professionals looking for freelance work.

The best type of writer you can find is someone who understands your work and your audience. It takes time and effort to find someone like this, but once you do, you’ll have a steady stream of great content published on your blog, which can increase your readership.

The Advice I Wish I Heard When I First Started Blogging

When I first starting blogging, I was anxious to write something that would go viral. I kept hearing stories of people who skyrocketed their blog after figuring out some traffic or social media hack. Unfortunately, no matter how hard I tried to “go viral” nothing I wrote seemed to catch on.

It wasn’t until I learned (the hard way) to think about blogging in a completely different way.
A blog isn’t about getting traffic, it’s about helping real people solve real issues. Traffic is just an indicator of that.

As soon as I started writing things that actually helped people, that’s when the Wild Apricot blog started to take off.

Now I regularly get emails from people thanking me for giving them a new idea or strategy, or that they’re going to share something I wrote with their board. And that’s really what blogging is all about — helping others.

Second to this, success doesn’t happen over night. It’s taken me months of consistently writing and publishing to build traffic up from the ground. So, if you don’t meet success right away (or even in the first few months), don’t get discouraged. Keep learning what your audience likes and keep trying to help them in the best way you know how.

With all that being said, best of luck with your blog!

This post originally appeared on the Wild Apricot blog.

Do you remember the last time you had to choose between two job offers? Or, perhaps, the last time you had to choose between staying at your current job or accepting a new position elsewhere? Do you remember how you made your decision? Which factors you considered?

There are some obvious ones—salary, benefits, career progression. But when all of these things are more or less equal, how do you determine which job will make you happiest?

It’s important to think about this question because it can provide some insights into your own employees. The factors you value may very well be the factors they value—and as such, you can use them to increase workplace morale as well as retention.

Let me run through a brief list, including some of the main perks that really make employees happier. This is based on data I’ve collected in my time as an executive coach and motivational speaker, working with companies of all types, all over the world.

What Keeps Employees Happy?

Some of the key factors include:

1. Flexible work environment. Do your employees get to work from anywhere in the world? Are they allowed to spend a day outside the office, perhaps working from a coffee shop, or even from the beach? The ability to work from home, or on the road, is something today’s employees treasure.
2. A culture of wellness. Do you care whether your employees are healthy, energetic, and focused? Do you make your workplace an environment that promotes healthy decisions, like stress management, physical activity, healthy snacks, hydration, and sound mental health practices?
3. Recognition. People like to be praised and affirmed for their good work, and they like to see their co-workers recognized, too. Weekly “high five” programs or simply a habit of public praise for great work can really go a long way.
4. Support for co-workers in need. What can you do to help a team member who’s going through a hard time? Access to counseling, or simply some additional PTO, is an invaluable way to show you care—and employees notice and appreciate it.
5. Education. On-the-job learning and career development opportunities show that you want your employees to keep getting better—and that you’re investing in them over the long term.

These are all things that employees prize—and when you implement them, it can lead to a happier and more loyal team.

Over the past several months, I’ve been on a bit of a rampage on sales and marketing automation tools. Some of my friends in those companies might be thinking, “What’s gotten into you Dave? Why are you turning your back on us?” Others of you may think I’m from the stone ages, and should just crawl back into some cave and be quiet.

In reality, I’m an advocate for leveraging tools and technology where we can achieve great gains in productivity, effectiveness, and customer engagement. In the hands of great sales people, these tools have the potential of amplifying top sales performers capabilities tremendously. We’ve seen sales teams leveraging tools with great impact and amazing results. All of the vendors can provide case studies reinforcing this.

Unfortunately, the majority of cases I see, are far from this. Too many of the tools provide marginal or no performance improvement. Rather than building the capabilities of sales people helping them become better, they become crutches. Sales people and managers come to rely on the tools as surrogates for developing strong sales capabilities, higher levels of impact and effectiveness, and thoughtful approaches to engaging our customers.

Why improve your ability to capture the customer’s imagination by planning a high impact sales call, when your tools just start dialing, connecting, and all the sales person has to do is read a script? Why research, target, and understand a prospect, when the tools do that for you, and all you have to do is blindly call a customer saying, “I have a cool product?”

Perhaps, not by design, but in implementation, these tools and new sales enablement capabilities have the effect of “dumbing down the sales person.” Not long ago, I wrote about how my car now provides many capabilities that dumb me down or make me less attentive as a driver. It’s clear the automobile industry is driving (so to speak), to a future where cars are autonomous and driverless. A lot of that makes huge sense (except to those of us who love driving.). We get far greater utilization and efficiency of highway/road infrastructure, we have far fewer accidents.

If one were cynical, conspiratorial, or even a thoughtful manager — similar thoughts about application of these tools in sales and marketing might come to mind.

What if rather than trying to improve the productivity and efficiency of my sales people, making them better, I could leverage the tools to enable much lower skilled and less expensive people? What if we can move more of the transactions to the web, eliminating the “human factor?”

In many cases, that world is here, retailing today looks very different because of Amazon and other web based suppliers. In B2B, many of the simpler transactions have moved to the web, eliminating the need for sales people.

In complex B2B sales, where the human factor is critical in engaging the customer on their buying journey, we have to think about the possible unintended consequences of leveraging these tools improperly.

Are we leveraging these to help reduce complexity and drive simplification–both for our sales people and customers?

Are we leveraging these tools to improve the depth, substance, and quality of the interactions we have with customers?

Are we leveraging these tools to improve the value we create with our customers and prospects?

Or are we instead “dumbing down” the sales person, making them less effective in engaging the customers, but offsetting this with higher volumes of interactions, playing a stupid numbers game?

Are we, instead, using these tools to displace deep interaction and engagement with our customers—even though that’s exactly what builds trust, meaning, and engagement with the customer?

In truly complex B2B sales, our customers are hungry to learn, they are hungry to be engaged. They struggle to buy, actively seeking help in learning how to buy from suppliers and trusted partners. It’s this deep engagement that creates great value and differentiation.

Again, if I were cynical, I might say, “I want to implement these tools which promise to make my sales people better. But instead of making them better, I can leverage lo I want them to be just OK or good enough. I probably could get away with far cheaper people.” As a purposeful strategy it makes a lot of sense. But companies aren’t getting to the cheaper part. They aren’t dumbing down or downgrading the sales organization, but they’re paying the same, just expecting less performance.

Few vendors have a sales strategy that says, “Buy my tool and dumb down your sales people.” Most sell their tools to make sales people better. Yet bad/sloppy implementations, poor leadership end up getting the unintended effect of dumbing down the sales organization.

As managers and leaders, we try to manage the cost of selling. Usually we focus on improving performance, productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness of our teams. But a hugely powerful opportunity is to keep the same performance levels at far lower costs, leveraging technology, tools, and far cheaper people. Any leader that isn’t examining this is missing an opportunity — perhaps.

But then there are our customers, what they need and expect—-yeah, those damn customer just get in the way of all our thinking about sales productivity, costs of selling, and so forth.

Our customers, at least in B2B, are hungry for more, they need insight, they need education, they need provocative thinking about their business, they need help. Much is written about customer experience (pre and post sales) as being the ultimate differentiator an value delivery system. To engage our customers and maximize our ability to create value with them, we need smart sales people.

There’s another aspect we overlook. Even with the all the hype around AI and machine language, we will never be able to anticipate and manage every situation with every customer interaction. Customers needs, requirements, priorities, attitudes shift throughout their buying process. In interacting with each other and in their evaluation of alternatives, we must constantly adapt to engage them in high impact ways. It’s unlikely, for some years, we can automate this. Instead, we need smart, agile sales people with the capabilities to figure things out and adapt on the fly.

We need to be cautious in our attempts to “automate” the sales process. Things that free up our sales people to engage customers in powerful, high impact and high value conversations are great. Those that don’t create a great exposure to our ability to create results.

Twitter offers brands a great opportunity to reach and engage with a large audience and increase brand popularity.

When it comes to analyzing and understanding the efforts of your Twitter marketing strategy, there is a lot you need to know.

There are plenty of twitter analytics tools you can use to measure your content marketing to branded hashtag campaigns.

This article will help to understand how inbuilt twitter analytics platform and other third party tools can be used for marketing and measure ROI.

How to access Twitter Analytics

Twitter analytics contains information about your actions on Twitter as well as people who follow you or interact with your tweets.

To do that, go to your Twitter Analytics page. You can also click on your profile picture on your Twitter homepage and select “Analytics” from there.

On the analytics page, you will find five tabs

• Home: Under this tab, you get a complete overview about how your Twitter account performed in the last 28 days.

• Tweet: The tweets tab displays stats about every individual tweet

• Audiences: In this, you get details about the behavior of your Twitter followers as well as other Twitter users

• Events: In the Events tab, you will get access to all the major future events that are bound to create buzz on Twitter. There is also a list of popular recurring hashtags

• More: Here you will get information about the videos you have shared, website tracking, and app manager

How these Twitter metrics can be used for Twitter growth

Here are some ofTwitter metrics which I find very useful for every twitter marketer.

• How to benefit from your performance overview
• Track your follower growth to increase visibility
• Use Impressions and Engagement Rate to find top performing content
• What kind of engagements you are getting – Retweets, Likes or Replies ?
• Find an ideal length of your tweets for better engagement
• What Is your tweet reach regarding followers?
• Which hashtags are best for your tweets?
• What is the best time to tweet (and get maximum engagement)?
• The best day to tweet and get maximum engagement
• Analyze top 10 interests of your audience for strategic twitter marketing
• Find how many of followers are your ideal customers ?
• Analyze audience availability and schedule tweets for better engagement
• Scale your audience by incorporating upcoming trends into your tweets
• Identify influencers who are sharing your content and reach a larger potential audience
• How to reshare top performing content using buffer

HOME TAB

How to benefit from your performance overview

Once you open the Twitter Analytics page, you can see a diverse spread of information. Right on the homepage, you can see the overall performance review of your profile. By default, this will provide a listing of these parameters over the course of the last 28 days

• Tweet (top) – The tweet that got the highest number of impressions
• Mention (top) – Tweet that mentioned your @handle and received the highest number of impressions
• Follower (top) – The twitter handle with the highest follower count that followed you in the given duration
• Media (top) – The tweet with photo or video that received the highest number of impressions

By getting this performance overview, you can easily use them to obtain your top media, followers, mentions, and more.

• Tweet/ Media (Top) can be used in marketing again as a new tweet
• Top Mention can be retweeted by you to get more engagement
• Follower (Top) can be reached out for content marketing.

Track your follower growth to increase visibility

The total number of followers you have on Twitter reflects the number of Twitter users that have chosen to follow your tweets. On the “Home” tab of the Twitter Analytics page, you will find your follower count and also how much the number has increased or decreased over the period of 28 days.

Apart from that, you will also see the parameters along with percentage change in the last 28-day period:

• Tweets – Number of tweets you posted
• Tweet impressions – Total number of views on your tweets
• Profile visits – Total visits on your twitter profile
• Mentions – Number of mention of your twitter handle

These twitter parameters are very important, because of many reasons including

• Twitter accounts with high number of followers are automatically seen as more influencing by users and they provide a social proof that your brand is a credible one.
• More number of followers means more people will see your tweets and engage with them. It also means that you have a higher chance of connecting with potential customers.
• Increase in profile visits and mention count shows growth in your popularity

TWEETS TAB

Use Impressions and Engagement Rate to find top performing content

Twitter Analytics allows you to measure engagement and visibility of your tweets through several parameters, including:

Impressions: It is the total number of times your tweet is seen by other Twitter users.

Engagement: It is the number of clicks or interactions your tweet receives. The interactions can be — likes, retweets, reply and clicks on hashtags, media, profile or links.

Engagement rate: Expressed as a percentage, it is the ratio number of engagement received per number of impressions.

Go to the “Tweets” tab on the Twitter Analytics page and you will be able to see the impressions, engagement, and engagement rate of all your tweets.

There are several ways to use this information to boost engagement, including:

• Discover your top tweets to see which type of content resonates the most with your audience. To check your top content, go to the “Top Tweets” option in the “Tweets” tab
• Find the hashtags that get your tweets more impressions than usual. Check your top tweets and see which hashtags you used in them that led to higher engagement and impressions. You can use these hashtags more often in your tweets.
• Analyze the peaks in the graph present on tweets tab to check on what days you received the highest impressions and then check what tweets made that happen. If there are certain days of the week that naturally get more impressions, then tweet more on those days. (We generally get more impressions on Thursday)

What kind of engagements are you getting – Retweets, Likes or Replies?

From the “Tweets” tab on the right, you can get an in-depth insight regarding various parameters associated with social engagement.

There would be a quick listing of statistics related to engagement rate, link clicks, retweets, likes, and more. Just like the above-mentioned insights, the duration for these stats can also be changed.

This will help you extract the inside information related to the overall engagement related to your account.

Let’s understand these engagement metrics

• Engagement Rate: It is the ratio of engagements received per number of impressions.
• Link Clicks: It depicts the average link clicks during the selected month. It also provides daily information regarding link clicks.
• Retweet: It shows a retweet count for the selected duration. Also, it depicts the average number of retweets for the respective period.

Certain graphs also depict the same kind of information related to likes and reply as well.

How is this information useful to you?

• More Retweets would suggest that people found your tweets valuable enough to share with their audience.
• Likes is also a sign of appreciation. It means that your content was liked by someone (though they did not find it worthy to share with their audience).
• Link click shows that people found your tweets interesting and wanted to further read your content.
• Replies depict that people are engaging with your content and want to interact with you more often.

EXPORT TWEET ANALYTICS DATA TO EXCEL

Twitter Analytics will make your life a whole lot easier with the option of exporting this data into a .csv file. All you got to do is select the duration from the calendar and click on the “Export data” button on Tweets Tab. A .csv file will be saved on your local storage, with the exact listing of your data.

Here is snapshot of the exported data:

Find an ideal tweet length for better engagement

“What is the ideal length for a tweet?”

Almost every social media expert has been asked this question.

While some marketers prefer short (and meaningful) tweets, some like to make them as informative as possible.

The rule of thumb is pretty simple. When it comes to Twitter, you can’t rely on someone else’s experience. Since every marketer has a different target audience, their engagement ratio with respect to a tweet’s length might vary from yours.

After exporting the Twitter Analytics excel file, you can view various kinds of metrics related to engagements. There would also be a column for every respective tweet.

To start with, you need to create a new column, solely dedicated to the length of every tweet. By using the “Len” function in excel, you can simply calculate the length of your tweets and store the value in a new column.

=LEN(C2)

(Here, “C2” in the cell having the tweet text. You can change this to your relevant cell.)

After applying this function, you can obtain the length of the provided tweet.

Ideally, you can create a separate column for the length of every tweet. I did the same to devise the relationship between tweet length and engagement. Here’s a snapshot of the same:

This is our data for the last 800 tweets (excluding our viral content). I took the assistance of Google Sheet’s chart feature to draft this plot. Simply select both the columns (in my case, it was AP and AQ) and go to Insert > Chart option.

If you wish to get the word count, implement this formula:

=IF(LEN(TRIM(C2))=0,0,LEN(TRIM(C2))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(C2,” “,””))+1)

What is your Tweet reach regarding followers?

Almost every market would like to calculate how many followers they are able to reach. Now when you have this comprehensive set of Tweet Analytics, you can easily do the same.

This will also let you know whether you should be resharing your tweets or not. Additionally, you can understand how your followers are reacting to your tweets.

To calculate the number of followers you are able to reach, simply divide the impression of a tweet with your total followers. Create another column in the same spreadsheet and depict it as the followers you are able to reach. Now, add the following formula to the column:

=Impressions/Total Followers

For instance, if a tweet has an impression of 380 and my total followers are 3129, then I’m able to reach almost .1214 (380/3129) followers (i.e. the ratio).

You should note that this data depicts the percentage of tweet reach with respect to your followers (and not the actual reach of your content).

Here’s the result for my Follower reach ratio:

After working on this column, you can also calculate the average reach for all the tweets as well. Take the assistance of the native Average function to do this, which is (=AVERAGE(AQ1:AQ1000)).

The average reach of my account is .06316.

If you want, you can also calculate this reach as a percentage (as the data we have calculated is in ratio).

Which hashtags are best for your tweets?

This is something that every content marketer can be highly-benefited from. Most of the people blindly go with their usual hashtags while tweeting. Needless to say, it is a wrong practice and should be avoided.

You should know what kinds of hashtags work best for your audience. Besides helping you pick the most suitable hashtags, it will also let you come up with new and promising keywords.

Firstly, you need to filter your sheet with respect to any hashtag. I applied a filter for #socialmedia on the Tweet-text column. This will yield all the tweets with the keyword “#socialmedia”.

Here you can see the results of the applied filter. Once you have obtained all the results, you can create a new sheet for the provided hashtag.

Follow the same drill and create different sheets related to all sorts of keywords you like to analyze. This will let you gain in-depth information regarding every keyword without much trouble.

What is the best time to tweet (and get maximum engagement)?

This is a million dollar question that every marketer would like to know.

While you must have read generalized statements about the best time to tweet, it is always recommended to learn from your own Tweet Analytics data.

There are a few other third-party tools as well (like Tweriod or Follwerwonk) that can help you do the same. Though, most of these tools only analyze when your followers are most likely to be active. On the other hand, with the help of Twitter Analytics, you can dig deeper and gain insightful results.

Firstly, you need to alter the “Time” column of the sheet to obtain a selective timestamp for the tweet.

=mid(D2:D,1,16)

By applying this formula, you would be able to extract just the date and time of the tweet.

Afterward, we will be making another column to store the time hour from this data.

=MID(D2:D2,12,2) and =MID(D2:D2,12,2)+1

The second formula will provide the upper time hour, which will be stored in another column

Great! You are almost there. The next column will store the hour range. It can be obtained by providing this formula:

=CONCATENATE(AU19, “-“, AV19)

If you want to gain more detail regarding this, then you can simply download the excel sheet template from here as well. AT, AU, AV, and AW are the discussed columns in the sheet.

That’s it! Keep your impressions as a baseline and create a scatter plot with this information. I have used Google Sheet to do the same.

Later, you can analyze this data to devise the best time to tweet with respect to your audience. As you can see from my chart, I have gained maximum impressions during 6-7 a.m. and at night around 10-11 p.m. (IST).

After analyzing the best time to post your content, you can easily schedule your tweets accordingly.

The best day to tweet to get maximum engagement

Just like calculating the best time to tweet, you can also do the same to know what are some of the best days to tweet as well. This will help you analyze the best day to tweet in order to get maximum engagement.

You can easily calculate the same after learning how to come up with the best time to tweet. Firstly, make a new column in the sheet to denote days.

=weekday(AX2)

This formula can be used to extract the number of the day from the provided date. Here, AX2 will store the date of the tweet.

Also, it is important to know that your days would be denoted from 0 to 6. That is, Sunday would be 0, Monday would be 1, and so on.

Once you create a column for the exact day of the week, you can depict a relationship between days and impressions (in my sheet, they are AX and AY columns).

As you can observe from the graph, we get maximum engagement on Thursday and Friday. You can also devise the same from your analytics data as well.

AUDIENCE TAB

Analyze top 10 interests of your audience for strategic twitter marketing

As we mentioned above, the “Audience” tab can drill down the popular topics that your followers are discussing or talking about.

The reason why audience interests can be highly valuable to your brand is because you can discover the topics that your followers are more inclined to be interested in.

Brand managers can then incorporate these topics with their brand content and there will be a good chance that their followers will read, share, and comment on the tweets.

How to further use audience interests into your social media strategy

• Incorporate your audience’s interests into your tweets and post accordingly. For instance, here 84% of the followers seem to be interested in Bollywood. If you create tweets about your brand that refer to popular Bollywood movies or dialogues, then those tweets are bound to receive more engagement.

• Tweet content according to your ideal customer. You cannot control who follows you but you can control the type of content you post and the people you follow. In case your Twitter followers and ideal customer don’t match, then start by following people who fit the profile of your ideal customer and post relevant content for them.

Compare followers with ideal customers and find products followers like most

With the Comparison audience option under the “Audience” tab you will be able to compare your Twitter followers with all the Twitter users. This will not only allow you to understand the demographics of your followers but also how they differ from the broader trends.

Twitter also lists out different audience persona and their demographics allowing marketers to research and analyze their potential customers and see how they differ from the brand’s current followers.

[bctt tweet=”Use Twitter Analytics to compare followers using filters like demographics, lifestyle, consumer behavior.” username=”socialertdotnet”]

How you can take advantage of this information

• Find your ideal customers and convert them into followers. While you cannot control who follows your brand, you can create specific content to attract your ideal customers. To start, compare your Twitter followers with the persona of your potential customer. For instance, if you are planning to launch a new beauty product, then you can compare your Twitter followers with Twitter users who actively show interested in makeup and beauty products to find the details of your ideal audience.

• Compare behavior of users from different income slabs to see what kind of content and products and topics those users gravitate towards and you can incorporate that in your content to attract more followers.

Analyze audience availability and schedule tweets for better engagement

Explore more about your followers under the “Audiences” tab. You will get information about your followers demographics, gender, location, interests, and much more.

But to be able to get the highest impressions and engagement, you must post a tweet when a wide section of your followers are checking their Twitter timeline.

For instance, most users check Twitter early in the morning. But if the maximum of your followers are in the US (EST or PST) and you are scheduling tweets according to GMT, then you would be sending out tweets five hours too early and your followers would miss the updates because they would probably be sleeping.

Instead, use Audience analytics to see where majority of your followers are located and then schedule tweets according to their local time.

The Audience tab has a “Demographics” option which reveals the personal insights about your followers —

• Age
• Gender
• Languages
• Country
• State

Apart from checking their country to schedule tweets, there are several other ways you can utilize this information:

• Schedule tweets for multiple timezones for countries like the US that have different timezones. You can check the states your followers are in and schedule tweets for the timezones where maximum of your followers reside

You can schedule them using Buffer Powerscheduler. I use buffer chrome plugin to schedule such tweets multiple times.

HOW EVENTS TAB CAN HELP YOU IN MARKETING

Scale your audience by incorporating upcoming trends into your tweets

Coming up with a winning hashtag campaign that is guaranteed to trend can be difficult, but you can find topics which are expected to trend on Twitter in the future to create tweets around them and increase engagement.

On the Twitter Analytics page, you will find the “Events” tab which lists out all the upcoming events that are bound to trend on Twitter. These events are also categorized according to Sports and Movies.

Apart from one-off events, you will also find recurring events and hashtags which trend every week.

By choosing a recurring hashtag that resonates with your brand, you can get increased visibility. For instance, many travel brands use #TravelTuesday hashtag to gain more traction.

USE THIRD PARTY TOOLS WHERE TWITTER PLATFORM NOT WORK

Use twitter analytics tool like socialert to reach a large potential audience

By connecting with influencers in the same niche, you can reach a larger potential audience and in turn gain new followers as well as customers. But just collaborating with any influencer doesn’t work. You have to find influencers who have the same followers as your potential audience or customers.

Currently, Twitter analytics does not provide a way to find top influencers in your niche. But you can use hashtag analytics tools like Socialert, for listing out the top influencers for a hashtag.

To find the top influencers, all you would have to do is enter the keywords and hashtag around your industry and a twitter analytics tool can quickly list out all the top influencers along with other analytics information.

How you can take advantage of this information

• You can reach out to the top influencers by retweet their tweets or replying them to create a connection.
• Collaborate with influencers over a twitter campaign to increase visibility of your brand through organic product placement.

How to use twitter analytics tool like Buffer to reshare top performing content

Buffer doesn’t just allow users to schedule their posts in advance but by connecting all the social media platforms under a single Buffer account, you can instantly share and schedule the same content across different platforms.

With Buffer, you can analyze the total reach of your tweets, link clicks, retweets, likes, and mentions.

For instance, you can take your top tweets from Buffer and reshare them again by clicking on the Rebuffer button to reach a wider audience.

You can also find the users with the largest number of followers that retweeted your content and start a conversation with them.

In conclusion

As we have gathered, just posting content on Twitter is not enough to get a successful Twitter marketing campaign. Instead, you need data from Twitter analysis to see what kind of content resonates the most with your audience and what doesn’t.

This Article is originally published here

Sometimes the simplest book marketing strategy an indie author can employ is playing around with pricing your book.

Because it’s one thing to have a book, but it’s entirely different to have one that actually sells.

You’ve probably heard this from other indie authors, or even experienced it yourself, your book gets added to Amazon, full of pomp and circumstance, and then, nothing.

It’s disheartening to see your hard work just sit there. But here’s the good news: it could be an easy fix.

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#indieauthortip: Maximize your ability to price your own book. Often overlooked, use it to trigger…
Click To Tweet

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Pricing your book is something we don’t often think of as a trigger for book marketing, or how to sell more books, but it definitely is. Here are some things you need to take into consideration:

Check Out the Competition

See what others are charging in your market.

And not just any books, top books, but not by household names – find the sweet spot.  You may be surprised what you find out.

But no matter what, it’s never a good idea to price your book outside of what the market can bear.

Price Rotations

Changing your book price is a benefit you have as an indie author, and it can help spike your exposure on Amazon, because it triggers the algorithm.

Look at changing your price once a month – shift between the $2.99 and $5.99 sweet spot reported by Amazon sales data, unless you’re doing a special promo, which I’ll discuss below.

Limited Time Price Drops

Indie authors should also dip below the sweet spot once a quarter and really do a big book marketing push to support it.

I recommend $.99 but sometimes $1.99 can get you decent exposure as well. And plan to keep it at that price for a solid 3-10 days.

Get the limited time price drop listed on a number of eBook promotion sites as well and be sure to promote it on your social media, your blog and your newsletter, whatever communication options you have at the ready for your book marketing efforts.

The Value of Free

But my book is worth more! Yes, your book is worth a heck of a lot more, in fact, if you add up all the hours you spent working on it, you probably couldn’t charge enough for it.

Here’s the thing though: you can’t focus on your worth or your book’s worth – you have to focus on what triggers sales, and buyers love a good deal.

So I urge you to consider freebie eBook promotions as well. For these you can drop the price for just a day or two and really promote the hell out of it.

This book marketing strategy is especially effective for indie authors with multiple books, doing freebie promotions introduces your work to more people, and assuming that book was damn good, you’ve now made a new fan that will continue to buy what you publish.

Permafree Strategies

So what’s permafree? Basically it’s an eBook that’s always free on Amazon.

Enroll in Kindle Unlimited. It’s a good one for indie authors who write in genres that tend to be really popular for KU.

Note that this isn’t beneficial to all authors so do your research, and then give it a shot if it looks promising. You commit to 90 days at a time.

Another, unofficial option to get a free book on Amazon, that’s free for anyone, is to ask Amazon to price match it.

I recommend choosing an older book, or book one in your series. Make sure you have published it everywhere. Not sure how to do this? Sites like Draft2Digital and Smashwords offer simple platforms to upload your book make it free.

These sites will publish the book on Nook, iTunes, Kobo and anywhere else you indicate.

Let Amazon know by clicking the “tell us about a better price” link. You can find this under the book details on your Amazon page. Sometimes you have to submit a few times so be diligent and check back every few days.

Once the book is free you’ll begin to see it surging up the Amazon ranks (under free eBooks).

Just make sure readers know you have other books. Keep your About the Author section current.  Ensure your Amazon Author Central bio current. If it’s a series, make it easier for readers to find the paid ones in the series.  Achieve this by naming the other books in the description of book one.

As a book marketing company, it is our job to help guide and direct you in pricing your book for success. Let our book promotion services help you assess why your sales may still be lackluster.

The Takeaway

Book marketing as an indie author is both complicated and exciting. So many options, so many opportunities, and only so many hours in a day.

Try different strategies for pricing your book. It can really help give you a boost when you feel like you’re doing everything else right and it’s not making an impact.

Every small business relies on email lists to find new customers and to sell to the already existing ones. They use a site builder to build their landing page and get a lot of sign-ups from new and existing clients.

Some of these businesses, however, find it difficult to draft copies that will compel their leads to buy. If your emails do not convert into business, there is something that you are not doing right, probably any of the following:

1. Wrong email structure
2. An ineffective bad approach to communication
3. Lack of an understanding of what the contacts want
4. Sending the wrong messages

As an online entrepreneur, your only hope of finding more clients is in the way you communicate with your customers. If you are not doing it right, your sales will suffer.

Thus, after capturing your customers’ contacts through a squeeze page or any other method, it is time to make them buy your goods and services. Here are a few suggestions on how you can do it.

Write for your audience

You have to write directly to your customers in order to convince them to buy. The problem with some business owners is that they write as if they are writing to themselves.

At the end of the day, even though those emails impressed those who are drafting them, they make little or no sense at all to the people for which they were meant.

If you do this, you will end up sending thousands of mails but making zero sales. Considering the competition that there is online, you have to change the approach.

A good way of making the email look like it was targeted to the customer is by thinking like your customer.

Ask yourself what you would want to read if you were one of those buying from your business. Think about the problems that the customers are going through and the solutions that they want to get from your small business.

If there has been any feedback from existing clients, think about addressing their concerns in the emails so that they will not only want to read to the end but also purchase a solution from you.

Personalize the emails

Do you just draft general emails and send them to all the customers in your contact lists? If you have been doing this, you have been losing a lot of potential buyers.

General mails never work because they look like a piece that has been sent to the public. In fact, few customers will read such mails past the headline, and perhaps, the introduction.

You can use special tools to include the names of the clients at the start of your messages to make it look as if they were directly sent to the individual.

You can also easily customize your small business mails by talking about some of the experiences that you have been through together with the customers.

You can, for example, talk about the sales you made before and ask if they liked the products that they got. You can then use that opportunity to let them know if there are other similar products or even an upgrade on the previous ones.

You can be sure that they will be more than eager to check out these new products; that is how you convert them into (repeat) buyers. The trick here is to make them feel an attachment to the business and think of you as their friend.

Provide a compelling call to action

One of the biggest mistakes that you can ever make is to send out an email that has no instructions. If you just narrate stories to your customers and leave it at that, they will only read and move on.

Providing a call to action is the best way to make them buy. Let them know that if they buy now, they will get a discount or a special offer.

A call to action should also have a timeframe. For instance, you can tell them that the special offer will expire in two weeks so that they can buy before that time elapses.

Bonus Tip: End your email with a question

A good way to ensure that your emails are replied to is to end your email with a direct and straightforward question. Most people can’t resist answering you, since you are making your recipient think about what you’ve written.

The best questions to pose to your recipients will be direct, personalized, and serve to assess their interest level.

For example

• Would you like to work together on this?
• Does this sound like a good fit for you?
• Would you be interested to discuss this with me in person?

When they do reply, you’ll know that you have a very interested customer.

Writing emails that will make the recipients want to buy from your small business is all about being a little creative. The key point here is to make sure that they like what they read and feel compelled to buy.

Jorge Solorio is the Industrial Americas Business Manager at Lubrizol Advanced Materials where he is responsible for marketing and sales for their Corzan product line. On this episode, Jorge explains how he led a strategic initiative to launch an online destination centered on one dedicated product within a large company. He also discusses how he is achieving alignment between sales and marketing with the results to prove it.

Lubrizol is a large chemical company that started in 1928. Corzan is their chlorinated polyvinyl chloride or CPVC product. Jorge said it’s similar to the PVC you’d buy from a home-improvement retailer, only it’s post-chlorinated and can be used with higher temperatures. Listen to this episode to discover how Jorge launched a dedicated website for Corzan and hear about the results they’re enjoying.

Launching a Dedicated Web Property for Corzan

Since Lubrizol is such a big web property, Jorge proposed the launch of a separate web property for Corzan. As an end user product, the target audience is different than the one Lubrizol.com markets. The purpose of the Corzan website is to expand on topics and educate their buyer persona.

Corzan.com started as a small experiment with a WordPress property on Lubrizol.com and as it grew, eventually switched over to HubSpot. At first, management didn’t understand the direction, but once Jorge was able to provide KPIs it clicked and helped with buy-in. Sales started to get excited about their endeavors with Corzan.com when they saw how many leads it attracted. Jorge and his team found that more quality leads were generated from the highly technical content.

As the site gained traction, they amped up their content marketing strategy. A marketing firm was brought on to write content and they now publish at least one blog per week. Listen to this episode to learn where the funding for the program initially came from and how sales is involved with the blog.

The Impact on Global Sales and Marketing Team Alignment

In his role as the Industrial Americas Business Manager at Lubrizol, Jorge runs the sales team and manages marketing staff across North, Central, and South America. He says he would grade their sales and marketing alignment as seven out of ten, which is pretty good for only working in alignment for one year.

Their CRM focuses on the sales staff and allows them to communicate with marketing. When designing the pipeline within the CRM, Jorge consulted a Lubrizol sales professional to ensure both marketing and sales have ownership in the lead generation process. Jorge says he sees the lines between marketing and sales blurring, noting that marketing can be held accountable with the right metrics.

The Corzan website is still being optimized. Jorge plans to continue prioritizing education over selling with their weekly blog posts and long-form eBooks. They have plans to incorporate video in 2018 so they can “show and not just tell.” Tune into the podcast to find out what content will be included in their videos and to hear more of Jorge’s sales perspective on aligning with marketing.

Featured On This Episode:

• Jorge Solorio on LinkedIn and Twitter
• Corzan’s website
• Register for Sales Team Alpine Resort (STAR) – the most important sales leadership think tank ever.
• Download Social Business Journal Vol. 10, The 5 Most Influential Topics for B2B Marketing
• Visit the Vengreso website
• Follow Vengreso on Twitter
• Discover how to boost your sales through the Vengreso Social Selling Virtual Boot Camp
• Write a review of this podcast in iTunes
• Social Business Engine on Twitter: @sbengine

Do you know how to close a sale in any selling situation? Avoid these top 7 reasons that clients don’t buy from you, and you’ll be on your way to closing every sale you go after.

The post How to Close a Sale – 7 Reasons Clients Don’t Buy From You appeared first on Sales Speaker Marc Wayshak.

Developing a robust network is critical to your professional success. After all, it’s often your primary source of business opportunities and referrals. But what if you don’t know the right people who can help you?

Perhaps you’re new to your field, or you’ve changed locations – but regardless of the reason, the problem is the same: if you’re starting with the wrong connections, how can you hope to work your way into the right ones? That’s a challenge I discuss in my new book Entrepreneurial You, and here are four strategies to consider.

First, embrace specificity. Your existing contacts likely want to help you – they just don’t know how, especially if your new realm is outside their area of expertise. So don’t just hope they intuit what you need. Instead, get specific about the type of people you’d like to meet. Your friends need to be able to visualize who would be a good introduction for you. For instance, you could say, “I’d love to consult for Google one day. Do you know anyone who works there that you might be able to introduce me to?” Or you could sort by title and tell your friends, “I’m interested in making connections with anyone you know who is a vice president of human resources. Do you know anyone with that role?”

You can also use LinkedIn to speed up this process; you can scour your friends’ contacts to see if there’s a specific person you’d like an introduction to. People’s level of closeness to their LinkedIn contacts varies; be prepared for them to say they don’t actually know the person well, or at all. But if they are good friends with that person, they may well be willing to make a personal introduction.

You and Your Team Series

Networking

There are plenty of people who wish cold calling was dead, buried and forgotten in selling. But the truth is, cold calling is not dead. It's not even dying.

Cold calling still serves a purpose for both sellers and buyers. And, done right, cold calling can benefit sales organizations and buyers tremendously.

Time-management skills can take a while to learn.

Étienne Garbugli, a Montreal-based product and marketing consultant, the author of "Lean B2B: Build Products Businesses Want," and the creator of a course for B2B entrepreneurs, distilled the lessons he wishes he'd known when he was 20.

He created the following presentation, posted to SlideShare, which we've shared here with his permission.

SEE ALSO: 7 of the best productivity secrets I learned from the woman who wrote the book on not wasting time

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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• New York-based firm has attracted over £6 billion ($8 billion) of funding to date and is worth up to £17 billion.
• JP Morgan's executive director Tim Leckie said a theory described by Nobel Prize-winning economist  Ronald Coase explains why WeWork-style offerings hold so much appeal for the start-ups and growing firms.

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LONDON — The rise of co-working start-up WeWork has been spectacular.

Founded in 2010, the New York-based firm has attracted over £6 billion ($8 billion) of funding to date with its millennial-friendly offering of short-term leases, trendy spaces. The company is currently valued at over $17 billion, and there's also widely-rumoured IPO in the pipeline.

Reversing Coase's Law

One of WeWork's most prominent backers is JP Morgan, which led an early $150 million funding round in 2014 which saw the firm valued at $1.5 billion.

Speaking at a panel discussion hosted by commercial property agents CBRE in London on Tuesday, JP Morgan's executive director Tim Leckie explained why WeWork-style offerings hold so much appeal for the start-ups and growing firms.

Leckie said JP Morgan had carried out research into the growing propensity for flexible workspace, and settled upon a law of economics called Coase's Law cited by Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google's parent company Alphabet, in his book "How Google Works."

Coase's Law, expressed by Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase, attempts to explain why big firms emerge, and it goes like this: Large firms emerged in the twentieth century because, after taking transaction costs into account, it was often more efficient to get things done within a firm, rather than contracting out on the open market.

"It was expensive to use the external market for transactions, whether it was getting pencils or accounting," Leckie said. "You had to go out and find a vendor, you had to search for reputation and price and negotiate. So you would internalise a lot as many functions as you could until the cost of doing it internally matched the external cost."

That environment meant the twentieth century was dominated by corporations that were big hierarchies or closed networks, which only worked with a tightly-controlled group of partners.

"What you do is you put that behind a big marble and glass lobby that basically says 'F off' to the world," Leckie said. "You're not sharing. And if you look at big corporate office space, that's basically what it looks like."

That changed, Leckie said, when the internet arrived.

"Now we've got the interweb. Connectivity is so cheap and you can go out and externalise so many more corporate functions. And there's people competing in each of those spaces, trying to improve and do it at a lower cost, so what firms are now doing is organising themselves for an open network."

That, Leckie says, "means a vastly different type of real estate. Big firms are opening up their networks because it's now cheaper to use the market and small firms don't need to grow."

Analysts still have serious questions about WeWork's business model: when it launched in the UK, it ran at a loss, taking less in rent than it paid out for its leases.

"It's the reverse of Coase's law and I think it's a very powerful model for explaining why perhaps the demand side is permanent.

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Summary: For years brands told consumers “YOU play by OUR rules.” Now, innovative companies are transforming themselves and developing new products/services built specifically to deliver on the changing needs of customers.

Consumers are increasingly disconnecting from brands that do not go the extra mile to understand their needs and are flocking to brands that do take the time to understand them.

VoC research we have conducted indicates that consumers feel that actions which demonstrate a commitment to personalization and value, build strong ties and reinforce loyalty. Conversely, when consumers feel that brands do not understand them, or fail to meet their needs, then the brand relationship is weakened and often, irreversibly damaged.

To connect with consumers, the following innovators are developing game-changing methods of meeting consumer’s needs.

1. Test. Evaluate. Expand.
Nordstrom did a test run of their Reserve Online & Try In Store as a pilot and it was so successful that 80 percent of shoppers who tried it continued to use the service multiple times. So now the company is expanding the program. Consumers can select the service from the website’s product detail page. They then receive both a text notification when their items are ready to try on at their nearest location as well as an in-store notification to locate their dedicated dressing room.

Per Shea Jensen, senior vice president of customer experience at Nordstrom, “Many of our customers like to feel and try on clothes and shoes before they purchase them and we’re excited to offer them a more convenient way to do so.”

Nordstrom’s innovative use of multi-channel engagement with consumers is just one of the reasons the company has seen 45% year-over-year growth for its in-store pickup options in 2016 as well as being one of the only department stores to see positive results in its latest quarter.

2. Anticipate What Consumers Want, and then Deliver.
Apoorva Mehta founded the same-day grocery delivery start-up Instacart to meet an unmet need. “It was 2012, people were ordering everything online, meeting people online, watching movies online, yet the one thing everyone has to do every single week — buying groceries — we still do in an archaic way,” he said. So, he came up with the idea for an on-demand grocery delivery platform. The strategy behind Instacart has been to, “… innovative and respond to challenges creatively.”

Mehta noted that, “if you use new technologies or look at the problem in a different way, you can come up with a solution that’s much, much better … I liked putting myself in a position where I had to learn about an industry and try to solve problem.”

3. Don’t Compromise Brand Standards
On Amazon’s first day as owner of Whole Foods they spent their efforts cutting prices as much as 43%. This move is a direct action to demonstrate that they are serious in their promise to change the way customers shop for groceries. Amazon also understands that they can make changes, but they need to maintain the Whole Foods reputation.

“Everybody should be able to eat Whole Foods Market quality – we will lower prices without compromising Whole Foods Market’s long-held commitment to the highest standards,” said Jeff Wilke, CEO of Amazon Worldwide Consumer.

The company has also rolled out new services specifically for its Amazon Prime members such as its selection of 17 new Amazon Fresh meal kits, access to exclusive deals and benefits. 365 Everyday Value, Whole Paws, and Whole Catch, can be purchased via Amazon’s Prime Pantry and Prime Now food delivery programs and Prime members will be able to order food items online and pick up at an Amazon Lockers at their nearest Whole Foods.

In summary, the new bottom line is knowing customer’s needs so completely that you can transform your business to innovate and create new services that break unchartered ground in customer experience engagement and value.

There are reasons that companies have their purchasing departments lead the selection of their strategic partners. There are reasons that arm’s length buying processes exist. The goal is an objective decision as to who their partners will be based on certain criteria decided beforehand. Why do they seek to prevent salespeople from developing a relationship, you ask? Why do they want an objective decision?

The reason these buying processes exist is that people inside companies believe that relationships create an unfair advantage.

I know you’ve heard that relationship selling was dead. You’ve heard that economic value is what’s important now, and it is important, but it’s not the only thing that makes up commercial relationships. A good bit about preference is the decision as to with who your dream client wants to work, who they want on their team.

• If relationships were dead, you wouldn’t feel the way you do when you get an RFP, and you wouldn’t wish you had a relationship that would tip the balance in your favor. You believe that a relationship would give you the advantage of mindshare and the advantage of preference. You might also have more information, things that could help you know how to influence others by making sure you addressed their needs.
• If relationships were dead, you wouldn’t be worried when your longest relationship in your largest and most loyal client leaves the company. You also wouldn’t worry when the lead person on a deal you are working quits the week before you are supposed to sign a contract. The reason you worry when your sponsor leaves is that you know that relationship protects you from the risk of being competitively displaced.

All said, there is nothing more likely to produce better results faster than people who work well together and who are on the same page. Transacting lowers prices, not the costs that are increased by transactional relationships.

If you want an unfair advantage, you need to work on developing relationships. If you want to stack the deck in your favor, relationships create preference. Relationships are not dead, especially not as it pertains to sales, selling, and business more generally. This means you need to be in front of opportunities, and you need to wire the building.

The post Relationships Create an Unfair Advantage in Sales appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Today’s most innovative companies know that in order to maintain a competitive advantage, the ability to move from idea to impact — fast — is what defines success. And a strategic approach to collaboration is a key component of any organization’s ability to operate with agility.

A recent survey of IT decision makers showed that 84% believe if a company has not strategically deployed enterprise collaboration apps, that they are actually at a competitive disadvantage. A collaboration strategy is much more than lighting up a new chat app or moving your internal drive to the cloud. As collaboration technologies have matured, a few key categories within collaboration have emerged: tools that help you create content, store and sync work, communication platforms, and manage work.

A well-built strategy includes technologies from each of these categories — and the four apps recommended below are not only leaders today, but have an eye to the future in a way that will help you grow your business.

Here are four apps you need — now and in the future. 

1. Google Docs

Content creation is at the heart of much of today’s work, and the ability to quickly and seamlessly provide feedback, edits, and commentary is a fundamental piece.

Google’s G Suite (composed of Google Docs, Google Slides, and Google Sheets) has been a leader in this space for years and Google Docs provide a seamless content creation and collaboration experience. Regular updates continue to add new functionality and add to existing capabilities and include creative integrations and connection points to reduce time spent switching between apps.

2. Box

Content creation software, like Google Docs, doesn’t negate the need for a solution to store and sync files. In this space, Box is an industry leader. Box brings rich content management and security to platforms like Google Docs or Office 365 to simplify the way many organizations approach storage and content management.

Box has an eye to the future, too, and are exploring the various ways artificial intelligence can help users find useful content and tools quickly. The company recently announced new functionality to help guide users to the right tools outside of Box using AI.

3. Microsoft Teams

The social component of work is undeniable for most teams, whether working together in an office or collaborating remotely. Thus a key component of any winning collaboration strategy is a platform that these groups can use to communicate in real time, outside of more static formats, like email. A relative newcomer, Microsoft Teams has experienced tremendous popularity.

Not only does Microsoft Teams facilitate group conversations, multiple integrations with other collaboration tools help add context to conversations. Microsoft has plans to make Teams even more useful — the company recently announced its intentions to sunset Skype for Business, and fold the enterprise business conferencing call capabilities into Teams.

4. Smartsheet

All of this cloud-based content creation, collaboration, and communication is only as good as the plan you put in place to turn it all into action and execution. That’s where Smartsheet, a cloud-based work management platform, comes into play.

Smartsheet combines the tried and true simplicity of its interface with powerful automation capabilities to empower knowledge workers everywhere to eliminate redundancies in work management and free up time to focus on creativity, innovation, and higher value work — without draining resources from IT or requiring expensive, time-consuming solutions.

Collective collaboration wins

The importance of a collaboration strategy is undeniable — now it’s up to business leaders to intentionally think through not only their chosen collaboration tools, but the composite whole.

Learn more about the state of enterprise collaboration.

This post is sponsored by Smartsheet. | Content written and provided by Smartsheet. 

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Amazon has temporarily lowered the seller fees on products that are $15 or less for merchants that sell nonperishable grocery items, Recode reports. It dropped the fee from 15% to 8% on October 15, 2017, and the promotion is set to end on October 14, 2018.

The promotion may lead to a wider assortment of inexpensive grocery products on Amazon’s marketplace, as it will be more profitable to sell there. 

Slashing seller fees should make it easier for merchants to make a profit on inexpensive items while selling on Amazon, which may result in more merchants selling their products on the marketplace. Before the promotion, merchants not only had to pay the full 15% seller fee, but also fees for Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) if they wanted their products to be easily available through Prime and other Amazon services.

Lowering the seller fees may also improve the types of grocery products available on Amazon. Prior to the new promotion, some retailers would only sell bulk grocery products on the marketplace, or sell wholesale directly to Amazon, which would then sell them through Prime Pantry or AmazonFresh. This allowed merchants to make a profit despite high seller fees, but wasn't ideal for Amazon, as such products aren't a fit for the everyday grocery needs of consumers who just want to buy their standard groceries online. Lower costs could allow Amazon merchants to sell the individual products that consumers are accustomed to seeing in stores, which could bolster the e-tailer’s grocery business.

If the promotion has the desired impact, it could help Amazon build out its grocery options beyond its specific programs. Amazon already offers AmazonFresh and Prime Pantry, but those cost $14.99 a month and $5.99 for shipping a box, respectively. These programs are valuable, but one of consumers' main issues with online grocery is that it's more expensive than standard grocery, so many won't stand for those charges.

Adding individual, inexpensive grocery products could make Amazon a grocery destination for those who aren't currently interested in its services, widening its grocery appeal. And as Amazon’s brick-and-mortar grocery ambitions face obstacles, it'd do well to solidify its position in online grocery, as the market's value is projected to skyrocket.

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Guest Post by Brenda Savoie

A sales manager is a person with the unique position of empowering and influencing the sales reps in a company. Turning around an entire team and increasing sales is a must if you want the company to succeed, but many managers fail to acknowledge this and allow even the smallest barriers to turn into big issues.

Fortunately, it does not take a lot to increase the positive impact a sales manager makes on the team.

According to Jessica Jang, a content manager at Bestessays, ”there are three key points a sales manager must pay attention to: motivation, alignment and performance.” Facing some pressure is common and not at all strange, but if you want to be a successful sales manager, you must come to work ready, and lead the team to success.

For those who don’t know how to manage sales effectively, it is best to learn from the best.

Here are the 12 habits every effective sales manager must possess in order to thrive in the workplace.

 

1. Pick Your Ideal Buyer Persona

Your task as a manager is to lead others in the right direction.

It won’t really matter how many hours you put in, or how hard you all try if you do not focus on the right audience. Therefore, your first task as a sales manager is to pinpoint the audience you want to sell to. Once you do that, you need to focus all the sales and strategies on your ideal buyer persona. This is a key step in increasing sales.

 

2. Prepare Ahead

What does it mean to “prepare ahead?”

It means that your job as a sales manager does not only comprise of the leading you will do while at work.

Having such a high position comes with big responsibilities, one of them being planning your actions ahead.

You are the one leading everyone else, so you mustn’t make mistakes. If you do, this may result in a failure of the entire team, which reflects badly on you as a manager. For that reason, you must consider every decision and its possible outcomes before guiding your team in that direction.

This is not as hard as it sounds. All you need is a bit of research and organization, and you can make an informed decision.

 

3. Hire Talent

Before you even start guiding a team, you need to find that team.

Do things right from the beginning – you cannot expect too much from people without the experience or expertise in the field you are working in.

Be selective and hire the best talent available. If you want the best results, you need the best team. Of course, this requires a higher investment, but will save you loads of money and time in the long run.

Hiring unqualified workers will result in more expenses on training, and provide you with no guarantee of success. Also, you’ll be spending valuable time setting the basis for the job, not doing the job itself.

 

4. Know Everything about the Product

In order to sell something, you need to know everything there is to know about it.

Your task as a sales manager is not only to find the target audience and focus the product toward them, but also learn everything there is to know about the product to be able to sell it.

If you know what your product is all about, you will know who your target audience is. Who needs what your product can provide? Who has the ability to purchase the product? Is the product widely available on the market? Are your prices competitive?

All these questions will help you make better decisions regarding the marketing and sales strategy.

 

5. Focus on Pipeline and Management

Talking to your team about forecasting and pipeline is very important.

This is why you need to know the difference between the two.

While forecasting puts the focus on late stage deals, pipeline focuses on the sales development in future. Therefore, the need for pipeline management is essential to a good sales strategy, since it will ultimately impact the forecasts and future success.

 

6. Build Strong Relationships

To be an effective sales manager, you must build strong relationships with the team.

Once you achieve this, you can easily set the expectations, motivate them and track their progress.

So, in addition to being the team’s boss, be their leader and mentor. This will help you boost their motivation and improve the team’s performance.

We all know the ‘bad boss’ type.

You cannot just give out orders and judge employees. You also need to lead them and take the time to acknowledge their successes. This relationship building will keep them motivated, and help you increase sales.

 

7. Believe in Your Product

Solely understanding the product can help your sales strategies, but will not keep you motivated in leading the team.

Without motivation, you cannot build a positive atmosphere in the workplace, or motivate others to sell a product you do not believe in.

Ultimately, the best way to convince someone that your product is the best is to believe in this yourself.

 

8. Always Follow Up

Your goal will always be to have all the sales and management components flowing under a regular schedule and standard.

However, sometimes things will go the wrong way, even if you have originally succeeded in leading your team into selling. This is where the eighth rule comes into play – always follow up.

If you see that a strategy is working, keep implementing it. If sales increase, follow up. Your task isn’t only to set the work of the team, but to maintain and manage it at all times.

 

9. Be Willing to Challenge Your Team

Your team may need a challenge as a way to become motivated.

Give them something to strive for to increase motivation and therefore, sales. You can try giving out bonuses if someone completes a challenge, or set up a competition to keep them motivated in increasing sales.

Most importantly, let your team know their work is valued. Acknowledge their achievements, even if they are small ones.

 

10. Practice Accountability

It is very easy to hold the salespeople responsible for all mistakes and errors, but if you want to be a successful sales manager, you must hold yourself accountable, too.

As a manager of your team, you are basically accountable for every failure they make.

Of course, your employees can make a mistake or disobey your orders. However, in most cases, the mistakes are a result of an error in management, and every bad result on a sale is a result of something you missed.

Perhaps you did not train or motivate that particular employee properly. You may have even spent little time on choosing your employees. Or, maybe you failed to develop the team’s skills and this is why they keep failing. And while this is their mistake as salespeople, it is yours as a sales manager, too.

It is only by accepting this as a challenge to improve that you can become a better manager and in turn, boost sales.

 

11. Create a Positive Work Environment

Yes, your sales team will make a mistake and of course, you should point that mistake out so that they do not repeat it.

However, you cannot build a terrible work environment where salespeople keep counting down the minutes until they can go home.

It is quite simple: If you want your reps to be working, you need to make them want to work.

 

12. Use Technology

Technology has developed a lot in the past decades, allowing every business to handle tasks easier and faster.

Make no mistake – you need to use the power of technology to the company’s advantage.

There are many ways technology can help you increase sales. You can use various programs and apps for sales automation, sales hiring, storage and even sharing important information with your team.

 

Once you start implementing these habits into your managing strategies, you will immediately start noticing positive results. It is not enough to just set one successful strategy. Your task as a sales manager is to always be ready and informed on the latest and best ways to guide your team.

 

About the Author

Brenda Savoie is a content marketer, life coach, and desperate dreamer. Writing her first romance novel. Seeking contentment through mindfulness. Check her blog BestWritingClues.

The post Guest Post: 12 Habits of Highly Successful Sales Managers To Adopt Today appeared first on SalesDrive, LLC.

Congratulations! You have finished your journey of creating buyer personas. Now you are done, right? Wrong. Just because you now have your personas written out, it doesn’t mean the work is done.

Only 44 percent of B2B marketers use buyer personas, yet 48 percent of buyers are more likely to consider solution providers that personalize their marketing to address their specific business issues.

Now that you have your beautiful, well-researched buyer personas, it is time to get grinding. But how, you ask? There are many different ways you can use your newly developed buyer personas. Let’s walk through some of the best places to start.

Share With Your Team

Personas aren’t just for the marketing team. They are for your whole organization. Once your personas are finalized, share them across your entire company.

Knowing your personas’ likes, dislikes, attitudes, and habits will make everyone’s job easier. Your sales team will know how best to speak to each different persona. Your designer will know how to appeal to each individual persona. Even your finance person will know how much each persona will likely spend over time.

Treat your personas like real people at company meetings and bring them up on calls and emails. Soon, your whole company will be utilizing your personas.

Identify Your Prospects

To best market to your prospects, you need to know which of your personas they fall into. The best way to identify prospects is to ask them an extra question on your form. If you are a sports warehouse, you might use “I am a…” with the drop-downs “player,” “parent,” or “coach.”

With this information, you know now which bucket this prospect falls into and can now market accordingly.

Stock Your Editorial Calendar

From your buyer-persona creation process, you probably came up with many different ideas for content based on your buyer personas’ pain points.

Take a moment to sit down, prioritize your content, and plan a good mix of content to speak to each of your personas.

You may also want to take a look at previously written content and repurpose it to better speak to your newly formed buyer personas.

Make sure you are hitting every stage of the buyer’s journey for each of your main target personas. You want to have the content you need to nurture your prospects down their appropriate funnel.

Nurture Your Personas Based on Their Needs

Once you have mapped out your content, it is important to spend some time on lead nurturing strategy. Does one buyer persona have a shorter buying period than the others? Does a persona not like email but would rather be retargeted on Facebook?

Take some time with each persona and decide what is going to be the best journey to lead that persona toward purchasing your product. Use all the research you gathered while creating your personas and put it to work.

If you have a piece of content that would be useful to multiple personas, create separate lead nurturing campaigns that focus on each persona’s pain points instead of just lumping them all together into one drip campaign. This helps no one.

Create Persona-Specific Experiences

We are officially in the 21st century, which means we can make customized web experiences for our prospects. Take full advantage of dynamic content and create a persona-specific journey on your website.

Allow the Prospect to Self-Identify

When your audience lands on your webpage, let them choose what information they are looking for. Below, HubSpot allows you to click if you are a small-business owner or a marketer, with different offers for each persona.

Smart Content

Once you know your lead’s persona, you can start using dynamic content to customize that persona’s experience on your website even more. You can offer that persona different content offers at the end of blog posts, display different messaging on site pages, and so much more.

Find Your Best Channel

The old saying still holds true: “Go where your customers are.” After your persona research, if you learned that the majority of your personas hang out on LinkedIn and very rarely check Twitter, start spending some more time on LinkedIn content and promotion. You don’t have to stop using Twitter completely but start doubling down on where you know your audience is.

If you know Parent Patty is on Facebook and Coach CJ is on Twitter, promote the content for Patty heavily on Facebook and the content for CJ on Twitter. You have developed buyer personas to know whom you are trying to target, and now that you know, it is time to start using your time wisely.

You have created personas, so half the battle is over, but don’t be like 44 percent of marketers out there—use your personas and start seeing the investment pay off.

How else have you used your buyer personas in your marketing efforts?

With each passing year, there are more examples of manufacturers doing impressive things with content marketing. Though manufacturers have been slower than those in other industries to adopt the practice of content marketing, CMI’s annual survey a year ago indicated a breakthrough: 59% said their organization’s overall approach to content marketing was more successful compared with one year before, and most (82%) attributed that success mainly to doing a better job with content creation.

Even so, many manufacturing companies are in the young/first steps phases of content marketing maturity, as reported in today’s release of Manufacturing Content Marketing 2018: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America sponsored by IEEE GlobalSpec Media Solutions.

What can manufacturers in the young/first steps phase do to take their content marketing to the next level? To get deeper insight, we looked at how their responses compared with those in the sophisticated/mature phase.

As a marketer, you may think there isn’t much you can do to change your program’s content marketing maturity – that it simply takes time. However, content marketing maturity doesn’t necessarily depend on how long a company has had a content marketing approach.

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#Contentmarketing maturity doesn’t necessarily depend on how long the program has existed, says @LisaBeets.
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For example, a company getting started with content marketing might invest in a team that can get the organization to the mature phase in a short period. Conversely, a company that launched a content marketing effort many years ago still can be in the young phase of maturity. This could be due to many possible reasons (e.g., staff turnover, budget cuts, a change in leadership).

Whatever the case, before making efforts to achieve more from your content marketing, consider your organization’s commitment to the approach. As you can see in the comparison chart, those in the sophisticated/mature phase are 5.6 times more likely than those in the young/first steps phase to say their organization is extremely/very committed to content marketing (13% vs. 73%).

While it’s true that commitment can strengthen based on results over time, how can you move forward if your organization isn’t strongly committed in the first place?

Thus, assuming your organization has made a meaningful commitment to content marketing, we offer six ways to grow in your content marketing maturity.

1. Develop a written strategy

Observation: Compared with 33% of the sophisticated/matures, only 10% of those in the young/first steps phase have a documented content marketing strategy (32% have a verbal strategy and 47% plan to have a strategy within 12 months; 11% have no plans to develop a strategy within 12 months). 

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10% #manufacturing marketers in young/first steps have a documented #contentmarketing strategy. @cmicontent
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Action item: CMI research has consistently shown that a documented content marketing strategy is one of the most important keys to content marketing success. Even if you’re just starting, formulate a content marketing strategy and write it down. (You can use this one-page plan.) It can (and will) change over time. The important thing is to document a starting point.

2. Deliver content consistently

Observation: Three-fourths of sophisticated/mature manufacturing marketers always or frequently deliver content consistently (i.e., on a defined, regularly scheduled basis) vs. 29% of those in the young/first steps phase.

Action item: Develop an editorial calendar as soon as feasible, and make it a priority. Decide which types of content you’ll deliver when. If it’s a monthly e-newsletter, get it scheduled. If it’s a blog post every other Wednesday, write the due date and commit to it. If it’s one webinar per quarter, put it on the calendar.

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Develop an editorial calendar as soon as feasible, and make it a priority, says @LisaBeets.
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“If you’re just getting started, focus on one type of content, on one platform, and deliver that consistently over a long time,” says Michele Linn, CMI’s editorial strategy advisor. “Be realistic with what consistent should mean for your team. Publishing every day – or even a few times a week – is time-consuming. If you are uncertain, start slower and build from there.”

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Focus on one type of #content & deliver that consistently over a long time, says @MicheleLinn.
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3. Set and communicate realistic expectations

Observation: Manufacturing marketers in the sophisticated/mature phase are far more likely than those in the young/first steps phase to agree their organization is realistic about what content marketing can achieve (67% vs. 29%).

 Action item: If your team is excited about content marketing, harness that enthusiasm but keep expectations in check. This is just one reason why your documented content marketing strategy is important; it should spell out your vision and each initiative along with realistic, achievable goals.

“It typically takes about 12 to 18 months to see results if you are distributing your content organically. If you want to speed up that process, put money behind content that is working,” Michele says. “For instance, if you have a blog post that is converting at a high rate, use a tool like BuzzSumo to figure out which social platform(s) it is best shared on and put some money on that post on that platform. Understand that the results of your program may be different in the early/young stages vs. when your efforts are more mature.”

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It takes about 12 to 18 months to see results if you are distributing your #content organically. @MicheleLinn
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For guidance on what you may want to measure when you’re getting started vs. when your efforts are more mature, see From Newbies to Seasoned Marketers: How to Measure Your Content Marketing.

4. Value creativity and craft in content output

Observation: One of the startling findings is that only 43% of manufacturing marketers in the young/first steps phase agree that their organization values creativity and craft in content creation and production (vs. 80% in the sophisticated/mature phase). Worse yet, 32% of those in the young/first steps strongly disagree that their organization values creativity.

Action item: If your organization doesn’t value creativity and craft in areas like writing, design, video production, etc., ask yourself why. Are you developing and distributing as much content as possible in the shortest period? Or is it because you can’t find or afford quality creative talent? Or perhaps your leadership doesn’t think it’s that important?

Whatever the reason, you need to stress internally the importance of quality output, which may mean adjusting your publication schedule. If your organization continues to produce subpar content, it’s wasting money – and probably hurting its reputation.

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If you’re not producing quality #content, you may need to adjust your publication schedule, says @LisaBeets.
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5. Get your content production process in order

Observation: Only 20% of manufacturing marketers surveyed rate the flow of content creation projects in their organization as excellent or very good. Indeed, CMI research shows this is a challenging area for content marketers across all industries. The processes to take a content project from concept through completion are often convoluted. The good news is that as an organization grows in content marketing maturity, project flow may improve as well (37% of manufacturing marketers in the sophisticated/mature phase rate flow as excellent or very good – not a great percentage, but better nonetheless).

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20% of #manufacturing marketers rate the flow of content projects in org as excellent/very good. @cmicontent
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Action item: To improve your content marketing (i.e., grow in your maturity) you need to develop effective processes to scale and create content efficiently. If you don’t prioritize the process, you’ll continually struggle to make strides, so this is key.

Content marketing practitioners and advisors who participated in the B2B Research Roundtable: Workflow Challenges, Bottlenecks, and Solutions at Content Marketing World 2017 offered insights for getting a handle on process issues. Suggestions include defining a common purpose, empowering teams to follow a streamlined process, and setting priorities to wrangle content chaos.

6. Be cognizant of the buyer’s journey

Observation: Twenty-one percent of manufacturing marketers in the young/first steps phase always or frequently create content for specific points of the buyer’s journey compared with 48% of those in the sophisticated/mature phase and 41% of all manufacturing respondents. Surprisingly – especially considering the nature of the manufacturing sales cycle – 38% of respondents say they rarely or never create content for points of the buyer’s journey.

Action item: Stop creating content that tries to be all things to everyone. As part of your content marketing strategy, identify the type of buyer who is your organization’s top priority. “Once you know who you’re focusing on, make sure you know what information that buyer needs at each stage of the journey,” says Kim Moutsos, CMI’s vice president of editorial. “Then create separate content pieces that address the information needs for each phase. Even if buyers don’t travel through their journey in a linear way, you’ll have answered their questions no matter where they are in their process.”

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Make sure you create separate #content to address buyer’s needs at each stage of journey, says @KMoutsos.
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For more insights

Looking for more manufacturing content marketing insights? Read the report to learn about:

• Content marketing activities that manufacturing marketers outsource
• Types of content, distribution formats, and social media networks they use
• Which technologies they use to manage content marketing efforts
• Percentage of total marketing budget they allocate for content marketing, and more

Where is your manufacturing company in terms of content marketing maturity? If you’re sophisticated/mature what did it take to get there? If you’re in the young/first steps phase, how will you move forward? Let us know in the comments.

To ensure that you receive the latest research when it’s released, subscribe to the free CMI daily newsletter. 

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post 6 Ways Manufacturing Marketers Can Improve Their Content Marketing [New Research] appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Everything You Need To Know About Building & Scaling Your Sales Process

Now is the time to modernize your sales process or risk becoming irrelevant. Why now?

There are two big reasons: technology and buyer behaviors.

Both salespeople and buyers now have access to an incredible array of new tech. It makes salespeople more competitive, and it has made buyers more empowered than ever before.

So while efficient sales stacks amplify revenue, sales teams also need to be even more empathetic.

As best practices shift, can you really afford to stay on the sidelines?

The top professionals at hyper-growth companies are busy hacking their sales process. Are you?

What is a Sales Process?

A sales process is a template for achieving sales objectives and replicating a desired level of performance by sales reps. It lays out a repeatable series of steps a salesperson takes to turn an early stage lead into a new customer. Each step in a sales process may consist of several activities and involve one or more sales methodologies.

An effective sales process is:

• Customer-centric
• Clearly defined
• Repeatable
• Predictable
• Goal-oriented
• Measurable
• Adaptable

A good sales process also aligns well with your ideal buyer’s purchasing journey, instead of focusing on what the seller needs.

The 7 Sales Process Steps You Need to Reinforce

The 7 most important stages of the sales process are:

1. Preparation
2. Prospecting
3. Needs Assessment
4. Sales Pitch / Presentation
5. Objection Handling
6. Closing
7. Follow Up

It can be complicated to create a sales process from scratch. Hell, it can be a challenge just to identify the specific steps that comprise your sales operations!

Plus, the number of sales process steps differs across sectors, sometimes varying even among businesses operating in the same space.

But to keep it simple, you can start with this seven-stage sales process:

1. Preparation & Research

Salespeople need to know about their product, target customers, industry, and the unique value their brand provides. Good preparation is the foundation on which the rest of the sales process is built.

Research your competitors. What can you offer that is different?

Spend some time in your customer’s shoes too. What are the core problems your buyer personas usually experience? And what are the benefits of your product that can address those problems?

Skim through your company’s knowledge base to learn how your colleagues solve pain points, handle objections, close deals, and generate repeat business. If you don’t have a knowledge base, talk to the top performers, and ask to shadow their sales calls.

2. Prospecting

Finding customers is one thing. Engaging the right ones is another.

You can find potential customers from many sources including your CRM database, social media, industry events, and online search.

Your sales and marketing teams should agree on an ideal customer profile and screen prospects based on this benchmark. This enables your team to allocate limited resources to high-value, qualified leads.

To ensure a healthy sales pipeline, prospecting should be an always-on instinct across your sales organization. That means reps should constantly be making phone calls, sending emails, and reaching out on social media.

3. Needs Assessment

Now that you have engaged a potential customer, you need need to do a little discovery to determine if they really even need what you’re selling and if your company is the best fit for them.

This stage enables sales professionals to create tailored solutions that increase the likelihood of closing a deal.

Active listening, empathy, note-taking, trust-building, and following up are great skills to deploy in this stage.

4. Pitch/Presentation

This is where you articulate the unique value your customers will experience if they purchase your product or service.

You can do this by connecting their needs and wants to the corresponding features and benefits your product provides.

Note that while preparation and product knowledge play important roles in this stage, customer-centricity should remain your default mode. It is a common mistake to focus too much on what you’re selling.

You can act as a trusted advisor during this step by referring back to what you learned during Needs Assessment, and listening closely to your prospect.

5. Objection Handling

Rejection and objections are common in sales. Any salesperson who lacks grit and the ability to roll with the punches will soon be out of the game.

To manage objections effectively, practice empathy and regularly process the situation from the customer’s point of view.

Related: PODCAST 20: How to Negotiate More Effectively to Close More Deals

6. Closing

This is usually where a sale is made, and all the effort up to this point is reflected in your company’s top-line revenue.

This step commonly involves sending a proposal or a quote covering the tailored solution you are offering.

You may also need to negotiate the contract or get multiple signatures from key decision makers in your prospect’s organization.

Attempts at closing do not always result in a successful sale. In that case, you can execute a follow-up plan, request a referral, or schedule the lead for future re-engagement.

7. Follow-ups, Repeat Business & Referrals

The sales funnel does not end after the first sale. Paying customers are great candidates to be prospects for your other services.

By maintaining excellent customer relationships, you can up-sell and generate repeat business more easily.

Nurture customers by keeping them updated about new services, and regularly asking for feedback on how you can serve them better.

Don’t be afraid to ask for referrals either. You’ve earned them at this point!

Sales Process vs Sales Methodology: What’s The Difference?

There has been confusion (especially among non-sales professionals) over the terms “sales methodology” and “sales process.”

While they sound synonymous, the two terms technically refer to two different things in the sales universe.

Sales methodology is the framework or philosophy that guides how a salesperson approaches each step within the sales process.

You may adopt a single methodology to govern your entire sales process or apply different methodologies in each step of the sales process.

Optimize Your Sales Process: Best practices, Tips & Tricks

As previously mentioned, excellent sales processes possess all these characteristics:

1. Customer-centric. Buyers are more empowered, better informed and have wider options than in the past. Smart businesses align their sales processes with this new reality.
2. Clearly defined. To be effective, each stage and element in your sales process must be well understood by all stakeholders.
3. Replicable. Every rep should be able to replicate all the steps in the process as well as their constituent activities without confusion.
4. Predictable. The flow and expected outcomes in your sales process should follow a predictable pattern.
5. Goal-oriented. A sales process systematizes your approach in meeting specific objectives (e.g., drive revenue growth, achieve process efficiencies, etc).
6. Measurable. All the activities in your sales process should be quantifiable, so you can measure success and improve.
7. Adaptable. A sales process must be flexible enough to accommodate changing business climates, tech integrations, or changes in your sales operations.

Charting Your Sales Process Map

To organize your sales process and the sales methodology, you need a well-designed sales process map.

Grab a notebook and a pen, or open any mobile app you like for making lists. Start by listing the stages and customer touch points in the workflow you use today. For example, two such stages might be lead generation and qualification.

Take note of relevant metrics. For example, you can note:

• The duration of each step
• The number of transactions
• The conversion rate to the next step

Fill each sales process step with all associated activities (cold calling, follow-up emails, etc.). Continue until each stage is complete.

Remember, sales process map evolves over time. You should continue to evolve your process to remain on top of shifting trends.

Build, Automate and Unleash Your Sales Stack

Even the most clever sales process won’t take you very far if you’re using outdated tools. New sales tech is rapidly changing the world of sales, so even “best practices” may now be due for an update.

Just think: twenty years ago there was no cloud, big data, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, or mobile communications.

But be careful! Technology can multiply the effect of good and bad sales processes alike. It can also be time-consuming to select new technologies to integrate into your sales stack.

There are tools that help sales reps improve, provide information about prospects, create helpful reports, and ease communication with prospects.

Here’s a guided overview on a wide variety of sales tools you may want to include in your stack.

Metrics: Weighing in on Sales Process Success

Not all sales processes are equal, so you need to conduct a sales process audit every now and then. You can do this by periodically analyzing your performance metrics and conducting A/B tests to compare outcomes.

For example, you can choose one activity in your sales process and change it, then see if results improved. Remember, metrics are your friends and staying in their good graces protects your profitability.

Hack Your Sales Process Now

With consumer behavior and market realities shifting at lightning speed, the need to adapt becomes imperative. Sales professionals can no longer depend on outmoded approaches. There is no other choice but to embrace customer-centric thinking and new technologies.

Your sales process is not exempt.

Without a reliable template to follow, your sales team will underperform. The only route to success is to re-imagine your sales process with the right knowledge, tools, and strategies.

The post Everything You Need To Know About Building & Scaling Your Sales Process appeared first on Sales Hacker.

It wouldn’t be Halloween without a little scare or trickery—but I can assure you that an inefficient Sales team is no treat for your organization. When Sales teams aren’t performing optimally, the entire organization can feel it. Not only from a monetary perspective, but from a brand integrity and customer experience perspective as well.

Here are 6 facts to help you avoid any scary pitfalls and better prepare you for change in 2018:

44% of Sales give up after one follow-up with prospective customers – IBM

Rejection is never easy no matter how you spin it and sometimes Sales may think that certain leads aren’t worth the relentless chase. But let’s put this into perspective. Eighty percent of prospective customers say “no” four times before they say “yes.” In comparison, 92% of Sales give up after four “no’s.” This means that the fifth time is the charm and Sales needs to expect, accept, and embrace the no to be successful.

57% of Sales spend up to one hour per day on data entry – HubSpot

While advances in technology have produced new tools to improve sales results, reps are wasting a lot of time on activities that don’t lead directly to new deals. Forty percent cited that manual data entry and lack of integration with other tools are their biggest challenges in using their existing CRM. With consumer buying habits quickly evolving, Sales can only succeed by having the right processes, technologies, and training in place to do their job correctly and efficiently.

Only 22% achieve Sales quotas without Mobile CRM – IBM

Another issue that Sales faces when utilizing a CRM is if it can be accessed remotely via mobile devices. Sales reps are constantly on the road and in client meetings—their technology applications need to meet them where they spend the most of their time. With a staggering 65% of Sales achieving quotas with Mobile CRM, the proof is in the dollar.

Only 19% of buyer’s trust Sales – HubSpot

Word-of-mouth, customer referrals, and vendor-authored articles are typically the most reliable sources of information for decision-makers. That’s why marketers need to equip their Sales teams with helpful insights that buyers can’t receive anywhere else. By positioning Sales as a trusted adviser and thought leader, they can make the best impression possible when they finally connect with a buyer.

7% of Sales responds to a prospective buyer after a form submission on their website – HubSpot

What’s even more alarming than that, however, is that more than half of Sales don’t respond to prospective customers within five business days. Imagine how that would make you feel. You visit a website, interested in learning more about a product or reading a specific piece of content, and no one from that organization follows up with you—even if it’s just to help answer any questions you may have or let you know they’re there if you need them. How impersonal is that? It’d certainly leave me with a bad impression of an organization.

40% of companies have either “moderately” or “fully” integrated their marketing and sales automation systems – Curata

Marketing tech stacks are becoming more important as teams pull together multiple resources to deliver relevant, personalized marketing assets to their audiences. Now is the time to start thinking about what tools are currently missing from your marketing and sales automation efforts so you can start the new year on the right foot.

Inefficient Sales teams can be a scary thing, but let’s not forget that this isn’t an attack on Sales. For them to perform at their best, they need support and resources from other parts of the organization. This includes support from product teams, marketing, compliance, IT, and many other departments. Take the time to think about how you can optimize any tools or resources you already have and how you can expand upon them to make more efficient processes. Your Sales teams will thank you.

Like every year before, 2024 will come with unique challenges and changes — and the sales landscape isn't exempt from those kinds of shifts. I anticipate the sales game won’t look the same as it does a year from now — just look at the changes we’ve already had in 2023. (I’m looking at you, AI).

It’s always helpful to get ahead of transitions early on and to help you get there, I’ve gathered the most important findings from our Sales Strategy Report and reached out to some sales leaders to get their takes on what you can expect to see in the coming year.

So, without further ado, here are some of the most pressing, prominent sales trends to watch in 2023 and in to 2024.

1. Salespeople are leveraging AI to meet their goals.

Our State of AI Report report found that salespeople save an impressive 2+ hours a day using artificial intelligence.

81% say it helps them save time on manual tasks, be more efficient in their roles, and provide a more personalized experience. It also makes prospecting more effective, helps them spend more time selling, and helps build rapport faster. 83% say that, as a whole, it’s effective in helping them meet their goals.

Dive into the Smarter Selling with AI Report

As of right now, the main ways salespeople are using AI/automation tools in their roles are to automate manual tasks, get data-driven insights and write prospect outreach messages.

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I only expect to see adoption of AI continue to grow throughout 2023 and 2024, so getting in on the trend is important. Whether you’ve just started looking into using AI for sales or you’ve used it for a while, Ryan Stanley, founder, and CEO of What Boss, was a guest on a Make It Happen Mondays episode, where he drops valuable insights into the role of AI in B2B sales, from starter tips to how it can help you improve your sales outcomes.

Click to listen to the full episode.

2. Sales and marketing alignment is more important.

Salespeople in 2022 said the level of alignment between sales and marketing teams hadn't changed from the previous year and that it hadn’t become more important for them to be aligned.

This year, however, salespeople are saying the opposite. 60% say that sales and marketing teams at their companies have become more aligned, and 61% say that their alignment has become more important. Businesses with this alignment say goal attainment is 107% more likely than companies with misalignment.

Why am I seeing this change? Economic instability.

Businesses with a customer base that may have tightened their budgets likely understand the importance of sales and marketing alignment when driving leads. If customers are downgrading or canceling their plans, it becomes even more critical to consistently draw in high-quality leads, which salespeople say is the biggest benefit of sales and marketing alignment.

3. Buyers are more informed and supercharged by AI.

Consumers told us that they prefer to gather information themselves before speaking to a human when researching a brand or product. Given this, it makes sense that 96% of sales pros say prospects are already highly knowledgeable and have already done their research when they first speak to them.

Buyers have been self-learning for a while, but what’s new in 2023 is that buyers are now doing their own research, supercharged by AI. And their research brings them further along the sales cycle before ever speaking to a rep.

What’s more, 67% of salespeople say that, by 2024, AI will enhance the buyer's ability to do research to the point that they will be able to make informed decisions without engaging sales reps.

This isn’t cause for alarm, though. It just means a salesperson's role will shift in the face of this change.

4. Salespeople are acting as consultants and relationship builders.

With buyers building their own knowledge, salespeople will become consultative relationship builders.

They’ll drive deals home and prove how their product or service will meet the prospects needs using the knowledge a prospect already has, answer any remaining questions, and build rapport that creates trust and long-lasting relationships. This aligns with salespeople saying that one of the biggest changes between 2022 and 2023 was the increasing importance of building trust and rapport.

I recognize that this might seem threatening to your job security, but most salespeople view this change positively as you get the chance to really flex your skills and expertise to show a buyer how a solution can truly meet their needs.

One survey respondent said, “Buyers using AI to self-educate could be threatening, but I believe it makes my expertise in advising and customizing solutions even more important for building trust. I can focus on building relationships and addressing their specific needs.”

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5. Sub-trend: Buyers and salespeople are having higher-quality conversations.

I’m calling this a sub-trend because it wouldn’t exist without buyers becoming more informed before talking to a sales rep.

Gone are the days of salespeople needing to provide every buyer with the most basic information about their product or service because a prospect might already have it.

Instead, buyers and sellers will have higher-quality conversations focused on personalized topics like how the product or service meets a buyer's specific use case. Salespeople will have to spend less time catching buyers up on the minutiae of what they sell.

6. The sales process will require more touchpoints.

Rarely do we make a sale at first contact with a prospect — although that would be nice. In reality, it's a process that requires multiple touchpoints. But here's the problem — the average salesperson makes only two attempts to reach a prospect.

In 2023, applying a multi-touch approach to build quality relationships is critical.

According to HubSpot's 2022 Sales Strategy & Trends Report, a third of sales reps say they average 2-4 interactions with prospects in the sales process. 26% of reps report 5-7 interactions.

On top of that, 84% of sales professionals communicate with a prospect across 2-4 different channels (i.e., email, social media, text, live chat, etc.).

"The long-term trend is going to be about meaningful interaction, communication, relationship building, and problem-solving," Judson Griffin, Intercom's Senior Director of NORPAC Sales, told me.

6. However, some businesses may experience a shorter sales cycle.

As buyers become more knowledgeable, empowered, and fueled by AI, certain businesses may experience a shorter sales cycle as they conduct research independently and move further down the pipeline before reaching out to a rep.

7. Demos need to sell the problem, not the solution.

Imagine selling a book. You could recite a few stats about its weight and dimensions, but you'd probably have more success selling the story inside — and how it can improve the reader's life.

Now think of your sales demos. How much time are you dedicating to the bells and whistles of your product instead of the problems it can solve?

Dan Tyre, Inbound Fellow at HubSpot, stresses this point by telling me, "Prospects are less interested in 'seeing how it works' and more interested in making sure you understand their needs, have a comprehensive idea of their requirements, and that the product will work."

In other words, your product expertise only gets you so far. Instead, it's more about your ability to uncover what your prospects truly care about.

Robert Falcone, the author of Just F*ing Demo!, echoes this, saying, "If you know what their primary concerns are, you can show them just enough of your product that aligns with their immediate problems and get a better result."

8. Freemium will kick-start the conversation.

Have you ever tried on a pair of shoes before buying? Or took a food sample at Costco? We live in a "try before you buy" world — which might explain why so many businesses have struck gold with the freemium model.

This model splits users into either a free or premium tier. The idea is that free users will eventually burn through their limited features and upgrade to a paid account.

48% of sales professionals offer prospects freemium options, and about 94% of them say it's moderately to extremely effective at turning prospects into paying customers.

Since it eliminates the cost of having an account (at least initially), it's a fantastic way to create a natural lead nurturing process. As Tyre tells me, "Offering a free tool or widget, product trial, consultation, or services checklist can increase your visibility, awareness and opportunities for people who are early in the sales process."

Of course, not every business is fit for this model. But if you're a SaaS company — or offer tiered memberships – it can be a powerful way to acquire more customers without spending more money.

9. Existing customers will take priority over new ones.

26% of sales professionals say existing customers took priority over finding new ones this year — and I predict this trend will carry over into 2024 just as it did in 2023.

This makes sense as a top sales priority, as existing customers make up 72% of company revenue on average (new customers make up 28%).

Of course, it's not enough to simply react when existing customers reach out. Instead, it's about creating opportunities to grow these accounts. How can you do this? Mainly through upselling and cross-selling.

Almost 92% of sales professionals try to upsell their customers. The result? Almost half of companies report up to 21% of their revenue comes from upselling. This is down from 30% in 2022.

When it comes to cross-selling, 87% of sales professionals use this tactic. Companies with reps that cross-sell report up to 21% of their revenue comes from cross-selling.

That said, it's easier to grow accounts when you maintain customer relationships after the initial point of sale. Ultimately, nurturing these relationships is the most important goal, which sets the stage for new opportunities.

10. The hierarchical nature of sales will flatten.

Help Scout's VP of Sales, Stuart Blake, believes over the next five years, we'll see a flattening of the hierarchical nature of sales organizations.

He says, "This has been happening for the last five to 10 years, but I hypothesize that it will accelerate over the next five. The main reasons why I foresee this is because more people are working from home — leading to more focus on the output of work, the leveraging of technology to get that output, and cleaner communication."

Blake adds, "There is also this larger sentiment in the air that we must simplify things, and therefore, processes. This move might end up being short-lived, but I think we'll see a shift of more doers and less managers on sales teams over the next five years."

Take this time to re-consider your existing strategy. You might determine there are more effective ways to organize your sales organization structure — enabling new opportunities for your sales rep as the industry evolves.

11. Efficiency is critical.

One of salespeople’s top goals in 2022 was making the sales process more efficient; the same is true in 2023. More so, salespeople in 2023 are saying that a more efficient sales process could be a top-growth driver throughout the year.

With the economic instability businesses faced throughout the pandemic, it’s no surprise that departments are working with less budget than in past years, and some industries are still seeing this decrease.

With tighter budgets comes ensuring increased efficiency. Sales processes and tools will need to be directly beneficial to meeting sales goals so budgets aren’t spent on anything that doesn’t impact the bottom line.

This is likely another reason I’ve seen AI become so popular in sales. Passing off low-touch activities to an automated tool allows salespeople to be more efficient as they have time back to focus on actual selling.

12. Personalization will remain a key driver of success.

The one-size-fits-all approach may work sometimes, but it's becoming obsolete each year.

In 2024, personalization will be the name of the game in sales. In fact, almost a quarter of sales professionals believe the importance of personalization is the biggest change in the sales field this year.

That said, you probably don't have enough time to spend hours researching each and every prospect. So how can you strike a balance?

I have to take it back to the trusty CRM, which can put all that data to good use to help you paint a clearer, more holistic picture of your customers. It's no surprise that 21% of sales leaders want to leverage their CRM to its full potential this year. If you’re a HubSpot user, you can take the power of your CRM to the next level with ChatSpot, a conversational tool you can use to research prospects and automatically add their unique data to their profile.

Get Started with ChatSpot

Besides your trusty CRM, AI has and will continue to transform sales. In this Make It Happen Mondays episode, Russel Bradley Cook, Senior App Partner Manager at HubSpot, has a conversation with Joaquim Lecha, CEO of Typeform, discussing AI’s impact on shaping and personalizing the customer experience. Their expert insight is a valuable listen.

13. In-person sales are creeping back.

71% of U.S. sales reps are hybrid workers, up from 45% in 2022. Employees also prefer a hybrid work model (read: greater flexibility in work hours and work-life balance).

But, even hybrid sales pros say in-person meetings are the most effective sales channel, which makes sense.

I’m tracing the emergence of this trend back to two trends I discussed above: more informed buyers and salespeople taking on consultative roles.

Informed buyers leave salespeople taking on a consultative role that relies heavily on building relationships and trust, and the trust and rapport-building opportunities that come from in-person meetings are unparalleled. We’ll see salespeople taking advantage of opportunities to meet buyers face-to-face.

14. Specialization in vertical markets.

In modern sales, “the riches are in the niches.” In other words, when you try to appeal to everyone, the opposite happens: you end up resonating with no one.

While targeting smaller markets doesn't seem like sound business advice, it's a surprisingly beneficial strategy. As Dan Tyre explains, "Although it's somewhat counterintuitive, the more focused your ideal customer profile the faster traction you should get."

For instance, suppose you're on a clean-eating kick. Which option are you most drawn to — a big-name grocery store or a health food store specializing in organic food?

On the sales side, targeting your audience can save you a lot of time, money, and energy from chasing the "wrong" leads.

Trish Saemann, the founder of True North, underscores this point, saying, "When you focus your energy on targeting a narrower audience, your message can be more customized. Customized messages are the ones that get the real engagement, and when that happens, there is a higher chance they will trust you to understand their needs. They will know you are a good fit for them."

In 2024, I predict we’ll see sales teams continue to "niche-ing down" to appeal to specialized markets and reap the benefits of a smaller — but more engaged — audience.

15. Sales culture remains a top priority.

If there's one thing that never goes out of style, it's having a winning sales culture — and 2023 is no different. But what, exactly, is a good sales culture?

According to Dan Tyre, it involves "Having a solid sales rep employee persona, quality and quick recruiting process, and [a] supportive sales environment."

Building a high-performing sales team should never fall to the bottom of the priority list. After all, how much a salesperson sells, how productive they are, and how long they stay at a company are all influenced by sales culture.

And it's one thing to establish a sales culture — it's another to ensure that you sustain those values as you scale and grow. By keeping culture top of mind, you can recruit great reps, promote healthy competition and collaboration, and drive results.

If you’re looking for more insight into building a sales culture, look no further than Adam Jay (especially considering he was named one of Demandbase’s top 25 sales executives for 2023). He sat down with John Barrows to talk about building a powerful sales culture, specifically the role authenticity has in building the culture. Click here to listen to their conversation.

16. Calling through your CRM.

On average, a sales rep spends only 28% of their day actually selling. The rest is spent on internal meetings, trainings, and prospecting.

So how can you leverage what little time you have for selling? Increasingly, the solution is a trusty CRM. Specifically, a CRM with call tracking features, which enables you to reach more leads with less effort.

Dan Tyre advised sales reps to take advantage of these tools, saying, "Most modern CRM’s allow you to call right through your technology, eliminating silos of wasted information, improving sales productivity, and allowing for review of recorded calls for training purposes."

Dean Moothart, Director of Client Solutions at LeadG2, adds, "Things like email templates, call recording functionality and calendar management links are new features that are taking sales productivity to the next level."

Final Thoughts

2023 is bound to come with a change of pace and a host of new trends and challenges. Though this list isn't exactly set in stone, it's a good place to start when hashing out what the sales landscape might look like over the next year.

Great SaaS sales reps can change your entire business.

The best ones are efficient, motivated, effective, and creative in how they operate on a day-to-day basis. They have a knack for identifying quality prospects, making strong impressions quickly, and closing deals that seem out of reach.

So what is it about these SaaS sales reps that differentiates them from the rest? What do they know about the industry that mediocre sales reps don't?

Let's break down a few things that all the best SaaS sales pros understand...

Upselling value to existing customers is key

Tomasz Tunguz explains that the fastest-growing SaaS businesses rely much more on upsells than their slower-growing competitors. And the larger the business, the greater the impact of upselling. While SaaS salespeople know that there are significant growth opportunities in upselling, far too many overlook it for one simple reason:

It’s hard.

Upselling is hard because when a relationship has already been established, it’s not always easy to know when to re-engage and offer something new. On top of that, an existing customer already knows your flaws, and they have an opinion on whether or not you’re delivering. So when you’re looking to make an upsell, you’re going into the interaction with previous baggage and need to show them the product possibilities that they could tap into if they give you even more money.

One of the best ways to make an upsell happen is to integrate the product into your efforts. Take advantage of the very technology you’re selling. Rather than picking up the phone on a whim to see if your customer would be interested in a premium plan, leverage data from their account. Track how close the customer is getting to their usage limits or their data threshold. Pay attention to any interactions within the product that could provide a reason for this customer to upgrade to a premium account.

Persistence is a key driver of SaaS sales

According to a study from The Bridge Group and their inside sales metrics, the average sales development rep makes 52 calls per day. If you’re not cut out for this type of persistent effort, it’s going to be tough for you to make the leap from a good sales rep to a great one—especially when you consider these stats from TOPO:

• It takes 18 or more dials to connect with a prospect
• Call-back rates are typically below 1%
• Only 23.9% of sales emails are opened

You might be thinking: Why do we even bother?

You bother because you know that once you get through to the prospect, you can deliver value that will drive meaningful results for their business.  

Technology is a modern sales rep’s best friend

One of the biggest shifts in SaaS sales has been the rise of inside sales.

Inside sales is the act of identifying, nurturing, and turning leads into customers remotely. While many people assume this means cold calling, the tools that SaaS sales reps can leverage go far beyond a telephone. Today, you can take advantage of inside sales CRM tools like Close.io to get an overview of all your sales activity and much more.

Technology has changed the way the best sales reps interact with prospects, maximize productivity, and perform other tasks essential for success.

Modern CRM tools and social media constantly create new ways for users to interact. The best sales reps recognize this and strive to stay on top of the latest technology, so they can be as efficient and effective as possible.

For example, according to a piece from Adobe, 54% of consumers receive at least one SMS message daily, and 50% of U.S. consumers who receive branded SMS texts go on to make direct purchases. When a great SaaS sales rep hears stats like this, their first instinct is to think about how SMS can help them nurture leads. Luckily, CRM software offers SMS capabilities to give you a 360-degree view of all interactions directly from your laptop.

Marketing metrics have an influence on sales metrics

Far too many sales professionals think that sales and marketing should be isolated. The best sales reps not only respect their marketing colleagues, they recognize the role that marketers play in helping salespeople achieve success. From the top of the sales funnel to the content living on your blog that helps sales reps nurture a relationship—marketing has a role.  

The most successful SaaS companies understand the importance of tracking visitors, trials, conversion rates, and closed deals, all with the goal of improving these key metrics over time. In most SaaS companies, it’s the marketing team that manages this stream of data, and the best sales reps ensure that they’re a part of the discussion. A sales rep can give the marketing team insights from the ground level and decrease the cost of customer acquisition.

A growing sales team creates a growing company

Tomasz Tunguz reports that the fastest-growing SaaS companies scale their organizations very quickly, growing their teams by an average of 56% each year. The best sales reps understand the importance of working as a team and growing with a company.

Many sales reps are territorial and reject the idea of competing with colleagues. The best sales reps welcome the idea of a bigger team. They don’t view their colleagues as competitors but as partners who can help them get closer to their quota and increase the overall value of the company.

How can you become a better SaaS sales rep?

Outside of these key insights, the best SaaS sales reps are all committed to one thing: Learning. The fact that you’re reading this post is a great sign that you’re well on your way to a successful career in SaaS sales. That said, it’s not going to be easy.

You’re going to have to invest in yourself and ensure that you’re working at an organization that is willing to invest in you as well. That means watching webinars, listening to podcasts, and talking to your team about the modern tools and training you need to be the best SaaS sales rep you can be.

If you’re interested in building a reliable and repeatable sales funnel for your SaaS business, sign up for our Startup Sales Success course. It’s a free course that gives you everything you need to stand out from the crowd.

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In almost every industry, referrals are the gold standard of customer acquisition. Research has repeatedly shown that referred leads close faster, buy more, and stay longer — all with significantly less effort and at a much lower CPA than non-referred prospects. A University of Pennsylvania study^[1] found that referred customers are more loyal and profitable — by a 16% margin — than their non-referred counterparts.

What’s not to like about that?

Truth is, most of us inherently understand the value of referrals. When we make a big purchase, we seek out reviews or ping our networks for recommendations. In fact, a 2016 Nielsen poll conducted on behalf of Ambassador revealed that, across industries, 82% of Americans seek recommendations from friends and family when considering a purchase. When we see the same people talk about a purchase they made? Nielsen’s survey for Ambassador suggests two-thirds of us are at least a little more likely to make the same purchase.

All of this has never been more true than in the age of the internet — a chaotic, noisy place where we’re constantly bombarded with blatant marketing messages, thinly-veiled “native advertising,” and unapologetic branded soapboxing. In this environment, a referral from a trusted source is a welcome respite from the subjectivity of typical brand communications.

So, why isn’t there more talk about referral marketing? It’s simple: More often than not, people expect referrals to just happen organically.

Here’s the problem with that assumption: While referrals do happen organically, they’re never a given — even if a customer loves your products and services. In fact, a Texas Tech University study^[2] found that while 83% of customers say they’re willing to provide referrals after a positive brand experience, only 29% actually do. That chasm exists for many reasons, but it’s often exacerbated by a failure to prioritize and manage a truly scalable referral marketing program.

How can your company close that gap?

Let’s start by exploring the basics of referral marketing, the techniques you can use to transform happy customers into revenue-driving brand ambassadors, and the simple steps you can take to ensure your referral program is easy to manage, measure, and scale.

DEFINING AND DEMYSTIFYING REFERRAL MARKETING

Ultimately, the goal of referral marketing is simple: To harness the power of authentic word-of-mouth to drive a steady stream of high-quality referrals to your business (and grow revenue as a result). Executing against that goal, however, is a bit more complicated.

For referral marketing to work, you need to have a few core building blocks in place:

A quality product that customers love: While referral marketing can generate dramatic results, it all starts with your product. If your customers are continually telling you how much they love it, they’ll probably be willing to do the same thing with their network.

A captive, engaged audience: If your relationship with customers is mostly transactional (think: buying milk at a convenience store) and your social following is disengaged, referral marketing might not be for you. If, on the other hand, you’ve built up a captive audience of loyal customers, fans, and followers, referral marketing can be incredibly powerful. Engage and incentivize them correctly, and you’ll see a big ROI.

A process to track, manage, and reward referrals: In order to move away from the traditional ad-hoc approach to referrals, you’ll need to implement processes that automate the repetitive nature of creating, tracking, and rewarding referral campaigns. This is the only way to make referrals a truly scalable source of revenue.

Beyond those building blocks, the core strategies that drive referral marketing aren’t rocket science. In fact, the approaches deployed by brands like Airbnb, Uber, and Google to drive incredible user growth are, for the most part, replicable.

The Do’s and Don’ts of Successful Referral Marketing

That said, referral marketing isn’t something to treat lackadaisically. In order to build a program that your customers, fans, and followers want to participate in, there are some key best practices you’ll want to keep in mind :

DON’T make customers do all the work

For referral marketing to be effective, you can’t expect existing customers to do all of the legwork for you. While the vast majority of happy customers say they’re willing to provide referrals, the truth is they’ll only follow through if the referral process is extremely simple.

DO consider how (and when) you ask

The best referral programs operate with a deep understanding of who they’re targeting, where those people are active, and which incentives will drive actions. Studying your referral candidates’ motivations and preferences before you reach out is critical to success. If you offer the wrong incentive to the wrong customer in the wrong environment, your program will fail.

DON’T “set it and forget it”

Like all strategic marketing initiatives, referral programs thrive in an environment of perpetual optimization. This is where referral marketing software becomes enormously valuable. With the right technology, you can create (and automate) much-needed process around monitoring, tracking, and incentivizing referrals. Over time, that will generate insight to help optimize results.

DO make referrals part of your broader strategy

The highest performing referral programs share a common thread: referrals are fully baked into every customer’s sales, marketing, and support experience. Referral CTAs are included throughout the company’s website. Employee email signatures feature referral messaging. And the referral program is fully integrated with other critical systems (CRM, marketing automation, eCommerce technology, point-of-sale systems, optimization tools, etc.).

One Key Takeaway
At its core, referral marketing isn’t overly complex. In fact, getting started is as simple as putting yourself in your customer’s shoes. Objectively, would you recommend your company’s products to others? Where and how would you do it? What incentives would motivate you to increase your referral activity? What barriers would keep you from doing it? Answer those questions and you’ll be well on your way to building an effective referral marketing strategy.

IDENTIFYING, ENGAGING, AND RECRUITING THE RIGHT BRAND AMBASSADORS

Think about the last time word-of-mouth influenced one of your purchasing decisions. Maybe a friend shared a free month of Hulu after bingeing your favorite show together, a co-worker sent you a referral code for free Uber credits, or a neighbor recommended their favorite contractor. Or maybe it was as simple as a friendly suggestion on where to go to dinner. Regardless, you probably acted on the referral, in part, because it came from someone you trusted.

Now, think about the last time you received a referral and ignored it. What led you to discredit the recommendation? A lack of trust in the person delivering it? The way in which the referral was shared? Generally, when referrals are directionless, or look and feel like an advertisement, we tend to tune them out — and rightfully so. In those circumstances, the “referral” feels interruptive and confusing, instead of helpful, beneficial, and authentic.

Why is that distinction important?

For referral marketing to work, you need to ensure experiences that align with the first description above, not the latter. So, before you start getting your marketing and sales teams excited, and engaging customers for referrals, let’s review how to ensure amazing experiences for your brand ambassadors, their referrals, and your team. There’s a process to engaging ambassadors, and if you manage it properly you’ll reap the rewards for years to come. If you don’t, it could come back to haunt you.

The Core Characteristics of Successful Brand Ambassadors

So, what does an effective brand ambassador look like? How should they act? What should they know? If you’re in the process of assembling an army of passionate brand advocates, here are the key characteristics you should be looking for:

1. They already know and love you

Quality brands already have existing relationships with raving fans – usually loyal customers. This doesn’t mean you should avoid reaching out to target advocates, but these are the people who are already telling their friends and/or colleagues about you and proudly promoting you whenever the opportunity arises. Failing to engage these people first could actually alienate them, making them feel passed over should they see other brand ambassadors promoting you, who may be – in their minds – less authentic in their motives.

What this looks like in practice: Make sharing your brand and products incredibly easy for your customers by making the “ask” when they are highly engaged. Including your referral program on a post-purchase or account login page is a simple and effective way to engage your loyal customers. The “ask” needs to be organic, taking into consideration how your customers already engage with your products and services. Try promoting your referral program on your social platforms by highlighting a brand ambassador who benefited from referring friends.

2. A High Net Promoter Score

The most effective starting point in assembling an army of passionate brand advocates is to pay attention to the customers who are already telling you they are willing to recommend your brand. Those 9’s, 10’s, and even 8’s are all but guaranteeing you positive word-of-mouth and countless referrals, you simply have to make it easy for them. It’s important to note that often times your biggest fans are not the ones spending the most money on your product or services, so be sure to leverage the voice of those customers who may not be your biggest spenders.

What this looks like in practice: Send an NPS survey to your entire customer database, this will allow you to gather feedback from both promoters and detractors, enabling you to not only consider detractors feedback and improve their future experiences, but also identify your promoters, whom you’ll want to immediately direct to your referral experience, giving them an opportunity to act on their good intention.

3. A Voice and an Audience

Whether on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, email, blogs, or other offline or online communities, fortunately many people have both the means to communicate and a network willing to listen. The important element here is allowing that person to individualize and tailor their promotion to their peer group – it has to be their voice and the message needs to resonate with their audience.

What this looks like in practice: Allow your ambassadors to promote your brand on whichever social media platforms they are most active on, or even offer printed materials for those who engage offline with potential referrals. Provide templated messaging that makes it effortless for an ambassador to share, but also easy for them to personalize with their own voice. You can provide the images, links, and codes to share, but let your ambassadors add their own language about why their network should use your products/services.

4. They Trust You

Winning customers’ trust to make purchases or become a user is a major accomplishment. If you’ve done enough to earn their promotion to friends, family, or colleagues, they really trust you. Now your ambassadors are trusting you to deliver an equally great experience to their referrals, and you’ve given them one more thing to care about, your referral program.

What this looks like in practice: Communication is the cornerstone of trust. If you clearly and accurately communicate with your ambassadors on how to engage, what their incentive is, and when they will receive it, you’re off to a great start. Set up email triggers based key events throughout the referral program to notify your ambassadors of referrals and rewards.

One Key Takeaway
Before you dive in, take some time to think about the ultimate goals of your program. Every aspect of who you engage first, how you engage, and when you communicate with them, depends on the goals of the referral program. Is your goal new customers, shares, traffic, app downloads, specific product purchases or usage metrics, leads, or revenue thresholds? Once you know that, you can start to build your program.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT INCENTIVE STRUCTURE
FOR YOUR BUSINESS

Even if you build up a roster of passionate customers, they may not be inclined to tell their friends about your brand without some sort of reward. That’s where referral marketing incentive structures come into play.

Running an incentive program to reward your ambassadors for referrals is a time-tested method of dramatically increasing referral marketing success. If you’ve used Uber, you’re probably familiar with the company’s incentive structure: Referred new users get $20 in free Uber rides, while the referrer gets $10 in credits for every friend who signs-up for an account.

This dual-sided incentive structure taps into customers’ innate desire to help others — and get rewarded for it. This approach also opens the door to a lot of creativity, because incentives can cover a broad spectrum of rewards — cash, gift cards, exclusive offers, access to premium features, etc.

Determining Your Optimal Incentive Cost

The first step in setting up your incentive structure is determining how much you can afford to pay for each referral. Before you perform that calculation, there are two things to keep in mind:

1. The incentive should be enough to interest your customers to participate.

There’s no “right” answer here, because it largely depends on the type of products or services you sell and what exactly motivates your ambassadors.

2. The incentive should not erase the profit generated by new customers.

Like any marketing channel, referrals should drive a healthy ROI. Rewarding ambassadors with an Apple Watch when the average new customer is worth $50 isn’t good for business.

To determine the optimal cost of your referral incentive structure, you’ll need to calculate two key metrics: Customer lifetime value (LTV) and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Most marketers are familiar with these metrics already, but it’s worth reviewing them here. So, to recap:

LTV is the amount of economic value (marginal profit) a customer brings in over their lifetime of sales with your company

CAC is the total costs associated with acquiring a new customer

To illustrate this concept, let’s imagine what the referral incentive calculation might look like for the average neighborhood coffee shop. If the average customer spends $25 in their “lifetime” and the profit margin on those purchases is 30% (after all hard costs and overhead are built in), then we can assume LTV is $7.50.

Knowing that number makes it really easy to determine how much you can pay in referral rewards to acquire your “average” customer. Using the coffee shop example, if you offer ambassadors $2 in shop credit for every new customer they refer, that leaves you $5.50 in profit margin for each referred customer. Win-win.

Three Distinct Types of Referral Incentives

While there are many ways to reward referrals, incentive structures can be boiled down into three distinct formats:

Single Incentive

This structure only rewards the original referrer. Because your business is only responsible for rewarding one part of the transaction, expenses are limited to only those existing customers who are doing the referring.

When and why this makes sense: If your brand awareness is low and margins are tight, single incentive referral rewards might make sense. In this scenario, you can offer a larger reward to just one party, which increases the likelihood of purchase. The single incentive also protects CAC.

Double Incentive

This structure only rewards one party, typically the Ambassador, but it rewards them twice. Most often, a smaller incentive for a less impactful conversion and a larger reward for a more impactful conversion.

When and why this makes sense: If you have a longer sales cycle it can be hard to keep ambassadors engaged from point of referral to reward. That’s where it makes sense to offer a double incentive. A double incentive typically offers a smaller incentive for a lower value conversion (i.e. a demo request) and a larger incentive for a higher value conversion (i.e. a purchase). This model is a great way to keep ambassadors engaged and referring.

Dual Incentive

Very simply, dual incentive structures give both the referrer and person being referred a reward, discount, or deal when a transaction is complete. Dual incentive systems tend to be more compelling since both sides of the transaction benefit from the referral. This also helps the referrer avoid feeling like they are taking advantage of (or profiting from) their network.

When and why this makes sense: While dual incentive programs are more expensive, they tend to yield a much larger volume of referrals and new customers.

Monetary or Non-Monetary?

“In a Nielsen Harris Poll conducted on behalf of Ambassador, more than three quarters (77%) of Americans said they prefered to be rewarded for referrals with cash.”

After deciding on the right incentive structure, you’ll need to consider what type of reward to offer your ambassadors. These rewards generally fall into two categories.

1. Monetary incentives

Essentially a finders fee, monetary rewards are easily quantifiable and tend to be successful at generating large volumes of referrals. These incentives include cash, rebates, discounts, gift cards, and commissions.

» Benefits: Monetary incentives make it extremely easy to calculate CAC and simplify things when analyzing the effectiveness of your program.

» Things to consider: If you offer $10 for every referral (regardless of whether they convert) and you get 10,000 of them, then you need to be prepared to pay out $100,000 without being assured of ROI. By contrast, if you offer a rebate or store credit, you can at least ensure that investment is used to drive sales down the road.

2. Non-monetary

These are less transparent rewards that can still be used to excite new brand ambassadors. They may include exclusive access to new products, public recognition (i.e., a video shout-out, tweet, etc.), or insider benefits not available to the general public.

» Benefits: Non-monetary rewards allow you to “shield your hand,” so to speak. Because there’s no tangible value attached to the incentive, you can dramatically limit the cost of your program and still reap the benefits of referrals.

» Things to consider: It typically takes a very strong level of brand engagement or an extremely exciting product for these types of incentives to work. Companies like Spotify or T-Mobile have the brand awareness and loyalty to use non-monetary rewards. But if you’re still building your brand reputation or don’t have a mass following, sticking to monetary incentives might be your best bet.

As a general rule of thumb: Incentives should always be profitable, tailored to your target audience, and compelling enough to encourage engagement with your brand.

One Key Takeaway
An economically sound incentive structure is one of the most important components of an effective referral marketing strategy. That said, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to incentives. Two companies in the same industry might offer completely different incentives depending on their economic model, customer target, brand awareness, and referral goals. As you’re building out your program, it’s critical to factor in your unique goals.

EFFICIENTLY TRACKING, MEASURING, AND
OPTIMIZING YOUR REFERRAL PROGRAM AT SCALE

After you’ve built an incentive structure and launched your referral program, you might start to see a steady stream of referrals pour in. And that’s awesome. Unless, of course, you’re not prepared to track and manage referral activity, measure results in real-time, and actually deliver the incentives you promised.

Quite frankly, this is where many referral programs fall apart or have difficulty scaling. Without the right systems in place, tracking and rewarding referrals can be a nightmare. Without a clear approach to measurement and optimization, you’ll fail to gather critical insight about customers and prospects that could improve your broader marketing strategy.

To avoid that fate, you need to implement processes that allow you to:

1. Attribute new customer activity to the correct referrer. If you’re generating new customers from brand ambassadors, you need a way to accurately connect which new customers came from which referrer. If you can’t do this, managing your referral program will be a nightmare.

2. Automate rewards in a timely fashion. If you’re generating hundreds (or thousands) of referrals a month and don’t have a way to automate conversion payments, your referral marketing strategy will become a drain on your marketing resources. You’ll spend more time managing reward payouts to existing customers than investing in activities that acquire new ones.

3. Learn, observe, and iterate. At scale, an effective referral program should generate incredible insight into customer behavior, prospect motivations, and channel preferences. It’s absolutely critical to have systems in place that can process and leverage that insight from Day 1.

Ultimately, referral marketing is most valuable when you’re able to easily amplify results without also proportionately amplifying internal resources. Without the right tools, capabilities, and systems in place, achieving that efficiency at scale is virtually impossible.

The Argument for Referral Marketing Automation

Developing referral measurement, management, and analytics functionality in-house is certainly possible, but it requires a herculean effort that typically involves (and distracts) internal technical talent. Luckily, there’s a simpler way to absolve yourself of those logistical and analytical headaches.

With a referral marketing platform, you can easily attribute new customer activity to the appropriate ambassadors, fully automate campaign logistics (i.e., issuing rewards, re-engaging disengaged ambassadors, creating/sending emails, etc.), and quickly integrate other third-party systems to seamlessly sync data between platforms.

Why is this so important?

By automating the referral marketing process, you remove much of the complexity, tedium, and guesswork from running campaigns. Ultimately, this frees you up to focus on the things that really matter — executing efficient, measurable, and profitable referral marketing campaigns that, over time, positively influence every aspect of your marketing strategy.

One Key Takeaway
While companies like Uber, Airbnb, and Dropbox built incredibly productive referral programs in-house, that DIY approach doesn’t come cheap. To do it right, those companies sunk a significant amount of time, money, resources, and technical expertise into building their programs, and they still require continuous maintenance and updating to remain modern. All of that can be avoided by investing in an all-in-one referral marketing platform that does the dirty work for you.

How Are You Making Referrals Work?

In a 2016 Nielsen Harris Poll conducted on behalf of Ambassador, 67% of Americans said they’re at least a little more likely to purchase a product after a friend or family member shared it via social media, email, or text message. Further, across a variety of industries, 92% of 18-to-34 year-olds say they seek recommendations from friends and family when considering a product purchase.

For marketers, those are pretty compelling numbers.

That said, for referrals to consistently deliver bottom-line results, they must be woven into who you are and how you operate. Without structure and commitment, you’re largely hoping that good things happen and that customers inherently know to refer their friends and colleagues to your business.

That might happen. Or it might not. As we know from the statistic¹ we cited earlier in this eBook (83% of customers are willing to give a referral, but only 29% do), banking on customers to refer without any clear incentive to do so is a risky proposition. The far better option is to approach referral marketing just as you would any other high-value customer acquisition channel — investing in process and technology, and incorporating it into every aspect of your marketing strategy.

When you take that approach, you’ll see the referral floodgates open up.

References:
^[1] https://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/files/?whdmsaction=public:main.file&fileID=5733
^[2] http://today.ttu.edu/posts/2015/04/why-referral-marketing-works

In 2018, you need a sales and marketing plan that makes the best use of digital marketing to create more visibility and drive revenue.

We’ve identified five major trends that should get your focus in 2018.

The businesses that are able to best take advantage of the these trends will get a huge leg up over their competitors.

To help you get you started — and to make this coming year more profitable for you — read about the five important digital marketing trends for 2018 below.

Content Marketing to Attract and Engage Prospects

Content marketing is nothing new, but it is definitely evolving.

Small business owners have gone from simple blogging to more complicated strategies involving infographics, ebooks and more.

You don’t have to go all out like that, but you should be providing your audience some sort of value through the content you post.

People want to be educated. They want answers to burning questions.

They also want to learn more about the things they already do so they can do them better.

Satisfy their need with content, and you will win their attention.

Hold their attention with consistently awesome content, and you can win their repeat business.

70% of people say they would rather learn about a company through articles than ads.

For this reason, around 90% of businesses that advertise online use content marketing currently.

Most are interested in shifting dollars from traditional ads to content, where they can find better returns.

You should create engaging, in-depth content with a strong visual element to attract prospects.

Reach more people by learning about the content they want to consume and giving them more of it.

If you stay in front of your prospects through regular content posting, you’ll increase the odds of being first-in-mind anytime someone requires your services.

When you can balance your services & expertise with things your audience wants to learn about, you can hit a marketing sweet spot.

You’ll find bigger returns on web traffic, social media engagement, and lead generation.

Video Continues to Dominate

You might not be into Facebook Live yet, but you probably should be!

Recent data from Facebook shows that people are 10x more likely to comment on a Facebook Live video than otherwise.

Even if Facebook Live does not work for your business, incorporating video into your marketing is key.

Consider that 45% of people watch more than an hour of Facebook or YouTube videos each week, on average.

Now, keep in mind that there are over 2 billion active Facebook users in the world.

A little bit of number crunching reveals that approximately 1 billion people watch one hour of video a week.

That’s a huge embedded audience to explore!

Video holds much more attention and communicates messages more effectively than text or still images alone.

Recognizing this, small businesses have been using video and finding huge returns.

Whether as a type of content or a paid ad, video drives huge amounts of engagement.

Research from Wyzowl indicates that 79% percent of consumers surveyed would rather watch a video to learn about a new product then read about it.

Also, “64% of customers are more likely to buy a product online after watching a video about it.”

So, people are not only watching video but also remembering what they see and actually buying things afterwards!

Small business owners can start working on their video marketing easily by answering common questions customers have — either Live or as a prerecorded release.

From there, consider repurposing some of your existing content into short, informative videos and uploading them directly to social media.

You know the audiences are there, you just have to give them something worth paying attention to.

Facebook Advertising To Reach Prospects

Facebook ads have become quite sophisticated in the past couple of years.

They’re finally at a point where even marketers for small businesses can target effectively while gain valuable audience insights.

Facebook has 1.3 billion active daily users, and they made $7.6 billion in ad revenue in Q1 of 2017 alone.

So, you know for a fact that audiences are there and that others are in on the game.

Without your own Facebook ad presence, your competitors are staying in front of your customers when you are not looking.

The average cost-per-click on Facebook is just $1.72, which means you it is a cost effective way to reach your prospects where they spend their time.

You can put your message about your business in front of high value prospects, even among very specific demographics.

When you combine video and Facebook Ads you really start to multiply the impact.

Recent data highlights the fact that social video (basically any kind of branded video or advertisement) generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined.

Using paid media and specifically Facebook Ads has quickly become a must to amplify your brand and product messages to your customer and prospects.

Even if your Ad is not runaway viral advertisement it can still likely generate more engagement, likes and awareness for your brand online.

Instagram & Influencers Drive Engagement

When it comes to consistent engagement, Instagram is the number one social channel out there.

That’s the conclusion of a study done by Yopto, which found engagement rate on Instagram to be 45% greater than on Facebook and 40% greater than Twitter.

What exactly does ‘engagement’ mean?

It means this: over 75% of users will take action on an advertisement post in their feed.

The key here is to let your customers do the posting as much as you do.

The same Yopto study found that 77% of people are more convinced by user-generated photos of a product rather than professional photos.

Crowdsource your own content by asking loyal customers for pictures of them using your product.

People love the attention, and you save on professional photography, so it’s a win-win for all.

Another key thing to know about Instagram is how powerful Instagram Influencers are.

“Influencers” refers to people with lots of followers and tons of engagement from fans.

There are all types of influencers, including subject matter experts who post videos and photos related to their expertise.

Small businesses can tap into these influencers at a relatively low cost.

Case studies have shown that niche experts in your industry will drive direct sales traffic without costing your company an arm and a leg.

Take the example of RESCUE, for instance.

RESCUE wanted to push their range of natural products, and asked a number of micro-influencers and bloggers to share their personal stories and include a “buy one, get one free” coupon with their post.

The results?

A 258% increase in Instagram followers — not to mention over 6,00 clicks to the coupon site.

Because of success stories like these, there is no question that leveraging micro-influencers to drive conversion rates will be a major trend in social media marketing going forward.

Optimized For Mobile Or Be Left Behind

Digital devices have completely changed how your customers search for and buy things. 2/3 of the world’s population is connected by mobile devices, and people now spend more time browsing on mobile compared to desktop.

According to data collected by SimilarWeb.com, 36.46% of Google searches come from a desktop in 2017, while 63.54% come from mobile.

It is expected that mobile use will continue to grow in 2018, likely surpassing the 70% mark by the end of the year.

The only conclusion you can draw from this: You must optimize your website for mobile.

Otherwise, you’ll hurt the experience for mobile viewers, causing them to seek out other businesses that can offer a better one.

What does being “mobile optimized” mean in 2018?

Looking at your search results appearance, for one.

Get found online by researching how your page appears on mobile search.

Mobile searches tend to bring up locally focused information, so reviews and accurate information about your business matter.

For instance, 50% of local mobile searches lead to store visits, so having accurate information on your hours is critical

The continued transition to mobile means people are searching for what they want in the moment at which they want it.

Let’s say a tourist is walking in downtown Chicago and searches for ‘best pizza’.

How will they compare the quality of competing restaurants within walking distance?

Usually, they will look to Google business reviews.

Research from BrightLocal points out that 90% of people search for reviews of a business before visiting.

That’s nothing to sneeze at!

The quality and frequency of reviews matters, so make sure to ask customers for reviews as part of your regular business routine.

Also, ensure the information available on your business from Google is plentiful and accurate.

You can start by using Schema markup on your contacts page.

At the same time, make sure you have accurate, updated directions to your business listed and your hours of operation updated.

All of these informative features need to be monitored and optimized for mobile use in order for you to keep getting business — rather than scaring business away.

Take Advantage of These Trends

In 2018, competing online is no longer an option.

It’s a must in order for your business to survive.

To grow your business you must apply a complete digital marketing strategy.

One that gets more Leads & Sales.

One that takes advantage of the shifts in Mobile, Social, Video, Reputation, Search and other digital marketing trends.

One that connects all the dots, so that people can find you on any channel but still have a consistent experience.

One that gives the information people need to make a buying decision through helpful content and a mobile-optimized experience.

This is the only way for your business to not be left behind.

If you take advantage of these trends, you will have a distinct advantage in growing your business over your competition.

We know how valuable your time is as a busy professional, and that it can be a challenge to keep tabs on competitive and industry trends. To make this easier, last year we added insights to our Premium experience, providing you with access to information like growth and hiring trends by function when looking at a company page on LinkedIn. We’re expanding Premium Insights with a new feature called peer benchmarking. With this feature, you can easily compare your company, or other companies you...

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Chart of the Day: Adobe Consumer Email Survey Report 2017

We are all guilty of it

As email marketers, we don't like to admit it, but we all do it at one point or another. We will annoy our customers. This is, unfortunately, part and parcel of email marketing, my little email geeks. You can't please all the people all of the time.

What do we do that annoys them?

So what annoys our clients? What are their pet peeves?

In our chart, we can see the main irk is getting emailed too often at 47%. This is no surprise. But what are the others? Let's look at the other top 3.

1. 32% are annoyed by too wordy/poorly written emails.
   This is a really good point. Long worded emails are boring and no one reads them. We need to write for emails, not an essay. Make your copy work for your clients.
2. 22% get emails urging them to buy a product they have already purchased.
   This is a common problem. It can be the data isn't available or dynamic content isn't being used.
3. 20% complain that an email offer makes it clear that the data held is wrong.
   We all sometimes fill out a form and just choose any information, correct or not. Surely we can't be held responsible for that? No, but it's up to us to keep our customer's data correct.

Final thoughts

You won't know what your clients think unless you conduct your own survey. So before you begin with your email marketing strategy, do your research - don't guess! Research may prove that emails should be short, but your clients may prefer long and detailed copy. Do the research and you may be surprised.

• Source: Adobe Consumer Email Survey Report 2017
• Sample Size: 3,028
• Recommended Resource: Email deliverability hub page

Here’s the surprising story behind the software that conquered the world, one slide at a time

Companies in the Software industry often struggle with marketing their products and services. Much of this struggle involves applying the appropriate strategies to attract more clients and win more sales. Easier said than done, but it largely entails implementing the right process for converting site visitors into leads.

For enterprises in the software business, this remains to be a challenge as increased competition over the years has encouraged important players in the industry to increase their marketing budgets and pursue more aggressive campaigns. This situation has, in fact, become a caveat for newcomers in the software industry. We all know that good ideas are just not enough to entice Software buyers and secure a competitive edge and that the real score is about using the best techniques for promoting a product or solution.

Fortunately, there are tons of methods for software companies big and small to secure higher quantities of leads and better revenue numbers. We just so happen to list down some of them below:

#1. Offer discounts

Who doesn’t like discounts, anyway? The word itself gives off a good ring to the ears of both vendors and buyers alike. For sellers of software solutions, discounts can open up opportunities for higher sales appointments. In fact, KissMetrics states that companies offering discounts are in a good position to increase revenue by at least 500%.

A word of caution though: Not all discounting campaigns and seasonal sales will result in higher profits. There will always be a tendency for customers to make purchases only when there are discounts.

Another issue to keep in mind is how much you are going to slash from your product’s price tag. You only want discounts because you want to attract even more customers without affecting your profit margins.

#2. Make your site visitor friendly

Your brand’s official site should always work towards increasing revenue and not to turn away potential buyers. Most initial engagements happen when a prospect enters your site and scans through its contents – in much of the same way as a tourist hunts for bargain souvenirs. Being the owner, you should always think of improving your store’s ambiance and make a good impression on anyone that enters.

This is the same thing you need to do with your site. Make everything accessible and easier for your prospects to navigate and browse through your offers. You can always start with responsive design elements. From the placement of buttons to the way you build your fill forms, these elements are essential to help your customers decide faster.

#3. Practice ad retargeting

One thing’s for sure, not all site visitors will end up actually buying a software product from you. Still, it is highly important to understand how most of them will return to the site and make a purchase. For all we know, they were just making shortlists of possible vendors and would eventually come back to get a better glimpse of what you are capable of delivering.

Knowing for a fact that bouncing visitors do not amount to rejections, you need to push ads that will continually remind them to come back and eventually make a purchase.

This is where ad retargeting comes in. Rather than let them go, you need to track their journey through the buying cycle. More importantly, you need to take a closer look at how they interact with your content.

Using these techniques will help you craft better messages that resonate well with your audience. However, you should always be mindful of the most effective timeframes for publishing your ads. Doing so, your software products will be able to win more buyers and lead to a huge spike in your revenue.

#4. Emphasize value

It may seem cliché to some, but in terms of generating plenty of software leads, you will have to demonstrate how valuable your products are to your prospects – even before they make inquiries.

In this vein, you need to make use of content such as reviews. These reviews will add to your brand’s authority, thereby giving prospects a very good reason to make a purchase. You can also solicit testimonials from previous and existing clients to provide your products with enough power to reel in new customers.

This post originally published at The Savvy Marketer.